The British marked the 4th of July the same way we did: by celebrating throwing off a British government.
The only difference is we’re now free of kings and parliaments from overseas; the British simply replaced one governing party with another.
The landslide victory by the left-of-center Labour Party runs counter to the recent swing to the right in France and other European countries, but all may stem from the same complaints about the economy. Democrats in the United States have no reason to cheer the ascension of Keir Starmer to the prime minister’s post. His ousted predecessor, Rishi Sunak of the Conservative Party, presided over a lower inflation rate than Joe Biden has, and still got blamed. In democracies, it’s natural for voters to swing back and forth between parties. After 14 years of Conservative Party leadership in No. 10 Downing Street, it was simply time for British voters to make a change.
The British election does give us an opportunity to examine our own election system by way of contrast. There are some quaint features of the British system that strike me as superior to our own: It’s the custom in Britain for all the candidates for a parliamentary seat to appear together on stage when the results are announced. British parliamentary districts — constituencies, in their lingo — also get names, rather than numbers. Instead of waiting on the returns from a district with some impersonal number, the British get to hear results from places like Old Bexley and Sidcup (that constituency stuck with the Conservatives, by the way).
More seriously, though, the big swing toward the Labour Party in this election helps remind us of how much American politics at the federal level are stuck in a near-even division between the two parties — what some might consider gridlock, what others might consider a benefit of our constitutional system of checks and balances. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, well, let’s look at some numbers, and then you can decide.
The Labour Party is set to take 412 seats in a 650-seat parliament — 63.4% of the total. That’s comparable to the big majorities that the Labour Party racked up under Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001, when it won 64.3% and 63.3% of the seats, respectively. It’s also comparable to the majority that the Conservative Party won in 1983 under Margaret Thatcher when her party took 61% of the seats.
The most apt comparison would be with our U.S. House of Representatives. During that same time period — from 1980 to today — our House saw similar majorities in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Democrats held majorities that ranged from 61.8% of the seats (after the 1982 elections) to 55.6% (after the 1980 elections).
Since Republicans won control of the House in the 1994 elections for the first time since the 1952 elections, the majority in the House has swung back and forth — and by much narrower margins. Democrats hit 59% of the House after the 2008 elections that swept in Barack Obama; Republicans hit 56.7% after the 2016 elections that brought in Donald Trump. Generally, though, the majority’s share has been much smaller — most recently, 51% for Republicans after the 2022 elections, 51% for Democrats after the 2020 elections.
Why are British elections so “swingy,” while our elections result in only a comparatively few seats changing hands?
There are several reasons: some systematic, and some unique to us.
No ticket-splitting allowed
A parliamentary system encourages such swings. British voters don’t vote for a prime minister; they vote for a party whose leader then becomes the prime minister. There is no such thing as ticket-splitting in a parliamentary system. Ticket-splitting has become less common in the United States, but it does happen. In 2020, there were 14 congressional districts across the country that Biden won but that still elected a Republican to the House. In a parliamentary system, if those voters wanted Biden for president, they’d have had to vote for a Democrat, which would have given him a bigger governing majority. In 2016, there were 13 House Districts that voted for Trump yet sent a Democrat to Congress. However, even if those districts had gone the same way in the House races as they did in the presidential race, the majorities, while bigger, would still have been more modest than what we see winning parties in Britain often get. That’s partly because of the other factors that follow.
Multiple parties split the vote
Britain’s multiparty system also makes such swings possible. While Britain has just two major parties — Labour and the Conservatives — there are other parties that win seats, too. The Liberal Democrats, despite their name, are closer to the center than Labour; the Reform Party is a nationalist right-wing party. There also are some regional parties, such as the pro-independence Scottish National Party. At least 10 parties appear to have won seats in the British Parliament, while our House of Representative has just two. Splitting the votes among multiple parties accentuates election results and makes the winner’s majority look bigger than it really is. Labour won a landslide in terms of seats, but not in terms of actual votes: Labour polled just under 34% of the vote nationwide. Even in those big British landslides of years past, the winning side never came close to a majority — Tony Blair’s Labour Party maxed out at 43.2% in 1997, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives at 42.4% in 1983. Those in the United States who pine for multiple parties should understand that, if they got their dream, the result would be that we’d never be governed by a party that received a majority of the votes.
Now we come to some factors unique to the United States.
We have (mostly) partisan redistricting
British constituencies are regularly redrawn to account for population changes, just as ours are, but the process is different — there are four regional commissions that draw the lines for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the United States, it’s states that are in charge of redrawing their congressional districts. Generally, that’s the state legislature (Virginia in the last cycle went to a bipartisan commission) and the majority party in the state legislature always has an incentive to gerrymander lines in its favor. At the moment, most states — 29 — have Republican legislatures. That gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the U.S. House, which has the effect of making it more difficult for Democrats to achieve a large majority.
Realignment and the demise of rural Democrats (and some suburban Republicans)
Voting patterns are often changing. They usually change slowly, much like tectonic plates, but they do change. One reason Democrats had such large majorities for a long time in the U.S. House was the phenomenon of rural Southern Democrats, who boosted the party’s numbers. We need look no further than our own state: Until 2000, Southside Virginia was represented by a Democrat: Virgil Goode of Franklin County, who later became an independent and, eventually, a Republican. Until 2010, Southwest Virginia was represented by a Democrat: Rick Boucher of Abingdon. (Disclosure: Boucher is a member of our community advisory board but board members have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) Now, neither congressional district — the 5th in Southside, the 9th in Southwest — is considered competitive. Those big Democratic majorities that once persisted in the U.S. House aren’t reflective of modern political dynamics. The more recent election results are.
Let’s look more closely at some of those returns, particularly here in Virginia. For a long time, Democrats held supermajorities in the General Assembly. Then Republicans did. As recently as 2015, Republicans held 66 of the 100 seats in the House of Delegates. Now they’re in the minority (barely). What happened?
Donald Trump happened.
Until Trump, Virginia had a lot of House districts that voted Democratic in presidential years but Republican in state legislative elections. Some of that might have been due to state elections having lower turnout; more casual voters turned out to vote Democratic in presidential elections, then ignored state elections. Many of these were also in suburban areas, particularly Northern Virginia. Trump proved particularly polarizing. He drove up Republican support in rural areas, but drove it down in the suburbs, thus accelerating a realignment that had been taking place much more slowly.
In 2016, there were 17 Virginia House Districts represented by Republicans that voted for Hillary Clinton. In the state elections the next year, 15 of those flipped to Democrats, the biggest electoral shift the party had seen since 1899. That was enough to turn a 66-seat Republican majority into a 51-seat majority. Two years later, Democrats surged to 55 seats. After Trump left the presidency, Virginia voters were more inclined to vote for Republicans, although not as much as before. Republicans took 52 seats in the House in 2021; Democrats took 51 seats last year. This may turn out to be the natural state of play in Virginia as long as Trump is out of office. Should he win the presidency again this November, it seems likely we’ll see another big Democratic surge in next year’s state elections. Should Joe Biden (or another Democrat) win, Republicans will be in a much better position in Virginia next year.
You may think we’ve now gotten far afield from the British elections, but we haven’t. What we just saw in Britain isn’t that much different than what we’ve seen in American politics; it’s just playing out in a different system. Same game, different rule book. While the Labour Party won, its winning percentage — right now, 33.7% — is not much different than what it got five years ago, when it was losing to Boris Johnson: 32.7%. More tellingly, the raw number of votes the Labour Party received declined slightly (British turnout was lower, because the outcome seemed obvious for a long time). The real story here isn’t some big voter swing toward Labour and the left, it’s the collapse of the traditional Conservative Party, which is being cannibalized by the nationalist Reform Party. If you want to think of British politics in American terms, the Conservative Party (if transplanted across the ocean) would be the party of Nikki Haley; the Reform Party would be the party of Trump. In Britain’s system, those are two different parties, trying to make their case to overlapping voter bases. In ours, Trump essentially took over the Republican Party and has now remade it into his own image.
Britain, like the United States, has seen many working-place constituencies realign from Labour to the Tories; Boris Johnson essentially capitalized on this. This year, the split on the right allowed the Labour Party to win many of those constituencies back. The question for Britain is how the Conservative Party responds: Does it move further right and become more nationalistic, to try to compete with the Reform Party? Or does the Reform Party supplant it as the main opposition party? Or will voters tire of those kinds of politics? A similar question confronts America’s Republicans. As much as we’re focused on this year’s election, what happens come 2028 when presumably Trump is either off the stage, or at least headed that way? How much has Trump permanently changed the party?
More broadly, right now we have closely divided electorates, both nationwide and here in Virginia. No matter who wins the November, that seems unlikely to change. That makes governance difficult, because no matter which party is in charge, there’s a large minority in disagreement. By contrast, the British system gives the new prime minister a big majority in parliament, even if voters don’t necessarily feel that way. He’ll be able to enact whatever program he wants, even if nearly two-thirds of British voters didn’t mark their ballots for the Labour Party. Is perhaps our system, which produces gridlock, better after all?
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