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Tactics – they help you win games. They can make the difference between victories and defeats, besting your opponent and suffering heavy losses.
In the final days of the election campaign, we’re hearing a lot of language about games: winners and losers, gains and losses, competitions, “fights” and “battles”. And with the recent slew of scandals involving candidates betting on the election, it can look very much as if politics itself has become a game.
But voters don’t like it. More than the insider info and the suggestions of “being out for themselves”, it’s the gameplaying aspect that turns voters off. Asking voters “who won?” a debate, in which they are offered a zero sum, binary choice, puts the personalities of the two politicians, rather than priorities, policies or programmes in the spotlight.
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Decisions about who holds public office, who represents us and how we make collective decisions shouldn’t be a game, something to “play”, of no great consequence. This cheapens politics and trivialises democracy.
For if politics is a game, it’s not a fair one. Most voters understand that the more politics is gamified the more it becomes about the “players” – those on the pitch, who play on with little relationship to those in the stands, consulting them once every five years.
And it’s even worse than that: most voters’ “power” in the game of politics lies in their vote. But in our First Past the Post system, where 70% of votes don’t make a difference to the final outcome, even the few tokens that voters are left with aren’t worth very much.
So they’re left to do the best they can with what they have: weigh up their options and, in many cases, back the least worst candidate to represent them. In other words: their only power is to vote tactically.
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Some voters do this at every election, never having been granted the chance to vote for someone who aligns with their political views. Some shun tactical voting, plumping with their preferred party every time. But we know that what determines whether one voter has power or not is simply their postcode: in a “safe” seat, they might as well put their vote through a shredder. Others regard this whole game as nonsensical, and opt not to play: at every election in recent memory if they all voted together the “unheard third” of eligible voters would win power every time.
At Compass, the organisation I work for, we hate tactical voting. It epitomises the worst of a democratic system unable to respond to the best of the 21st Century: people’s appetite for participation, their capacity for complex thinking and their openness to innovation and imagination.
It forces parties into tight electoral straitjackets, incentivising them to say little and work around the margins. Particularly for progressives, who might want to expand people’s sense of possibility, First Past The Post punishes a visionary approach, pushing them instead towards a small-target strategy which leaves activists struggling to deliver a script and most voters frustrated and confused.
The media reinforces this sense that the parties have just got to “get the job done”, full of praise for Labour’s ‘efficiency’ (only targeting seats they can win), as if ignoring up to a third of all seats at most elections was normal for a national party wanting to assume government.
At this election, some Labour candidates in so-called “non-battleground” seats have been asked to sign a contract, promising not to campaign in the seat they were selected to represent. Instead they submit to being shipped out to a neighbouring “winnable” constituency.
Activists have been blocked from accessing voter data by the party machine, banned from even canvassing voters in their area. For mos