The Lib Dems are flat in the polls. So why is their seat count about to soar?
There are a lot of interesting stories to tell with next week’s general election in the UK. The Conservatives are looking at the lowest popular vote since the modern party was founded nearly 200 years ago. Reform UK has surged in the polls, though a lack of regional concentration could make converting that into seats a struggle. And while the projected share of the Labour vote has waned over the last couple of weeks, the poll average still points to an increase not too far below what Tony Blair achieved in 1997.
But what about the Liberal Democrats? Their leader, Sir Ed Davey, has tried to get the attention of UK voters in unusual ways. Despite that, though, the share of the Liberal Democrat vote is very little changed from where it finished in the 2019 general election.
However, despite the very little movement in the popular vote, the general election is set to dramatically increase their representation in the House of Commons. In 2019, the Liberal Democrats won 11 seats, of which three were lost due to boundary changes arising from the 2023 Boundary Review. Despite no increase in the popular vote, the Liberal Democrats will have a significantly larger number of MPs, with some estimating that it could surpass their 2005 peak of 62 seats.
This is an interesting peculiarity of the first-past-the-post system, where the number of seats that a party wins can be more about how the electorate feels about their opponents than about themselves. And so, in order to examine how a party does under this system, we need to look at the marginal seats, understand who their main opponent is in each of these seats, and how the said opponent will do.
And so, for the Liberal Democrats, we must look at two things to get a gauge of their success in the general election. First, we must look at which Conservative and SNP seats the Lib Dems would gain when those two parties lose support. Then, we must look at which Lib Dem seats Labour and Reform would gain when those two parties advance.
Lib Dem Targets
There are a considerable number of seats that the Liberal Democrats stand to gain from the Conservatives’ collapse, even if the Lib Dem vote share stays unchanged. If the Conservatives dropped 24% in every constituency in Great Britain, the amount that the poll average suggests, that would give the Lib Dems 27 additional seats in the House of Commons.
However, polling suggests that the Conservatives are likely to face even bigger losses in the south of England, outside London. These are the regions which have the most marginal seats between the Conservatives and Lib Dems, and where the Conservatives risk losing a vote share of around 30%. That kind of Conservative collapse in the south would net the Liberal Democrats 39 seats in that part of the country alone.
Of course, all of this is based on the Conservative collapse being uniform, and the Lib Dems staying flat. If we see more tactical voting than usual, this number could end up even higher.
Lib Dem Defenses
On the other hand, the battleground between Labour and the Lib Dems is all but empty. Labour was not the runner-up in any of the eight seats that the Lib Dems are defending, and Labour would have to see a 30% increase in their share of the vote across Great Britain to gain even a single seat from the Lib Dems.
As for Reform, their strongest region in the country tends to be in the north of England, where the Liberal Democrats currently have no seats and are expected to make few gains. This means there’s no reason to believe there will be any real competition between these two parties during this election.
Across all of the seats that the Lib Dems notionally won in 2019, their main competition is either the Conservatives or the SNP, both of which are on the decline in this election. Holding these seats, therefore, should be relatively straightforward.
Looking back to past elections
In recent history, we’ve seen two general elections where the number of Lib Dems returned to the Commons has been linked more closely to the Conservatives’ performance than their own.
The 1997 election saw the Liberal Democrats’ vote share drop slightly, but because of the collapse in the Conservative vote that year, the Lib Dems more than doubled their seats in the House of Commons. On the other hand, despite the excitement towards the Lib Dems in 2010, the party lost more seats to the Conservatives than they gained from Labour as the Conservatives returned to government.
And in 2024, when as the Conservatives face what could be the worst result in the party’s 350-year history, the Liberal Democrats will be able to gain many MPs in the House of Commons just by staying still.
The 2024 UK General Election will be held on Thursday 4 July from 7am to 10pm.
