Victoria Jones/Press Association via AP Images
First-past-the-post has a tendency to distort the makeup of a legislature. Though the Conservatives won only 44 percent of the popular vote in the U.K. general election, they took 56 percent of the seats in the House of Commons.
In the aftermath of the devastating British election—in which Boris Johnson’s right-wing, pro-Brexit Conservatives won a historic majority, while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour suffered its worst defeat in decades—two main theories have emerged to explain the shocking result. While centrists condemn Corbyn’s leadership and left-wing manifesto, those on left and right lay the blame on “wokeness”—Labour’s embrace of the anti-Brexit Remain faction that wished to stay in the European Union, including young urbanites and people of color (the party ultimately campaigned on a second referendum on Brexit).
Both of these theories are wrong. What lost Labour the election—and handed the country to five more years of disastrous right-wing rule—was the electoral system of first-past-the-post. If the American left wants to avoid the same fate, we need a strategy for overcoming that brutal constraint.
First-past-the-post (FPTP) is a system in which people vote in individual electoral districts—like constituencies in Britain or congressional districts in the U.S. House of Representatives—for a single representative. Whichever candidate in the district gets the most votes—even if that is well short of a majority—wins the seat.
FPTP always has a tendency to distort the makeup of a legislature compared to how people actually vote, giving far more weight to voters in swing districts than those in safe ones. When a political party’s supporters tend to be disproportionately concentrated in a small number of areas rather than spread geographically evenly—as is the case for today’s Labour party, and the Democratic Party’s urban base—this distortion can have massive political consequences.
That’s exactly what happened last Thursday in Britain. Though the Conservatives won only 44 percent of the popular vote, they took 56 percent of the seats in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, even as Labour got its lowest share of seats since 1935, its 32 percent of the vote actually exceeded the party’s popular vote in 2015 and 2010.
Most shockingly, in an election seen as a landslide for Brexiteers, their parties actually failed to secure a popular mandate, garnering only 48 percent of voters. The Labour-led coalition of second referendum and Remain parties won an outright majority, 52 percent, of British voters.
So in what is supposed to be a democracy, a right-wing U.K. minority won over a left-led majority. The stakes of such an outcome for the transatlantic left could not be higher.
For most of the past two centuries, the left could win popular and electoral mandates in FPTP systems, thanks to coalitions of workers and progressive professionals in big cities like New York and London and rural industrial regions like the coalfields of West Virginia and Cumberland.
But deindustrialization since the 1970s has changed that, and a winner-take-all economy with giant corporations ensconced on the coasts has exacerbated it. The loss of good jobs in the heartland meant waves of young people migrating to big cities, making the distribution of left voters geographically lopsided. The erosion of union power weakened the connections between left politicians and their industrial base. And the right’s cynical blaming of people of color and immigrants for small-town economic despair has turned once left strongholds into a conservative base.
All of these dynamics were at play last Thursday, when an election framed largely around Brexit saw the Conservatives and their Brexit Party allies make enough inroads into Labour’s postindustrial, pro-Brexit heartland in the North to swing a slew of seats with narrow pluralities. Meanwhile, heavy Labour voting in strongholds like North London (where Jeremy Corbyn won his seat by a 49-point margin) was effectively wasted on a small core of safe seats.
We see this not only in our Congress, but presidential politics in the U.S. Analysis of the 2020 race focuses on as few as three Midwestern swing states where the outcome will likely be decided, and we’ve seen two presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote in the past five elections.
It is a profound crisis for the left when winning popular mandates—for economic populism and social progressivism—still equals electoral loss. To simply abandon the will of the majority and cater solely to a small minority of swing-district voters may be acceptable for the morally bankrupt right, but for the left it is an abandonment of our very principle of democracy.
For us on the American left watching the outcome in Britain, there is another way: defeating the distortions of first-past-the-post.
The best solution, of course, is to adopt proportional representation (PR), in which the share of votes received by a party matches the share it gets in the legislature. With PR, the geography of a coalition base doesn’t matter: Each and every vote has a corresponding impact on government’s makeup. The benefits are clear: As Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden has shown, countries with PR systems spend a far greater share on social expenditures than those with FPTP.
There’s actually legislation in Congress to make proportional voting a reality: the Fair Representation Act (H.R. 4000), which would establish multimember congressional districts. Under such a system, instead of voting for just one representative to Congress, you’d be able to cast votes for several, proportional to the size of your district. So if a congressional district votes 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, instead of electing one Republican to Congress (and thus discounting the voice of the Democratic minority), it could elect three Republicans and two Democrats. Proportionality of votes to seats is ensured, and ranked-choice voting (in which voters select their first, second, third, and so on choices) would allow third-party candidates greater representation as well.
It’s unlikely to get elected representatives to alter the system that put them in office. But even short of passing long-shot legislation, there are other options. At the state level, for example, Maine has introduced ranked-choice voting, meaning that, say, a majority coalition of Democratic and left-wing, third-party voters could win seats that would have gone to a Republican plurality in FPTP. And there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a bill that allows states to bypass the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote (if states with a combined majority of electors adopt the legislation, they would all be bound to pledge their electors to the national popular-vote winner).
Even short of electoral reform, there are important strategic decisions progressives can make to perform better in our FPTP system. While reversing the root trends of rural ethno-nationalism and urban economic concentration, or simply waiting for favorable demographics (in the U.K., Labour won a majority of voters under 35, while the Conservatives were supported by 62 percent of those 65 and older) will require many years, there are short- and medium-term solutions available.
For example, framing elections as referendums on progressive policies that are popular across regions—like universal health care, for example—would allow national politicians to maintain FPTP electoral coalitions. In addition, breaking up concentrated corporate power would give smaller towns a chance to thrive. That, along with expanded investment (and even expanded immigration, which adds to regional dynamism) in Middle America, could reverse the regional inequality killing the left in national elections.
And progressives can focus on building power at the state level, which besides winning state governments, can form winning geographic coalitions. Rebuilding union militancy in right-to-work states, as the Democratic Socialists of America have started to do, is a vital part of this, as is mobilizing and turning out disproportionately left-wing young nonvoters and nonvoters of color. Such strategies have already borne fruit in states like Kentucky, where Democrat Andy Beshear took the governor’s mansion by driving up the margins in cities and suburbs, and outperforming in coal counties.
There’s no doubt that one of the greatest threats facing the multiracial working class today is a first-past-the-post election system that divides us while uniting our enemy. But by recognizing and actively organizing against this constraint, progressives won’t have to choose between popular mandates and electoral majorities: We’ll be able to win governments by and for the people, once again.
