It’s that time of the year to look back and figure out what actually happened over the last twelve months. Here’s my take on three of the biggest votes of 2015 and what they told us.

 

UK General Election

7 May 2015

People are still scratching their heads on this one. Who was brave enough, or astute enough, to predict not only that David Cameron would be returned as Prime Minister, but that he would end up leading a Conservative majority government? Perhaps quite a few had an inkling that he would carry on in Downing Street after negotiating his way through a seemingly inevitable hung parliament. Far fewer had a sense of how things would actually unfold. When Matthew Parris wrote in his Times column in March that “the Tories are going to win – and win well,” I couldn’t help but wonder if he really believed his own words, or whether he was just having a bit of fun by writing something completely different to virtually all of his journalist colleagues.

As it turned out, he was spot on. Sceptical of the polls, none of which suggested that a Conservative majority was attainable, he relied on good old fashioned anecdotal evidence. So what happened? Were some Tory voters ashamed to admit their true voting intention to pollsters? Was there a late swing when people had to make up their minds for real? Or were the polls just wrong all along?

All three are plausible, but the evidence all points to the last explanation: opinion polls simply did not capture ‘public opinion’ as it really stood. Polls often work beautifully. By taking a random sample of the population, we can get a reliable and valid snapshot of what ‘the people’ think without having to ask everyone. But this only works if the random sample is representative of ‘the people’. After collective soul-searching and post-mortems, academics and pollsters have come to recognize that the polls conducted before May’s election just weren’t representative enough of people who would actually turn out to vote. Younger voters are giving pollsters a real headache: the young people who took part in their surveys were simply too interested in politics compared to those who didn’t answer calls from polling companies or take part on an online survey panel. Since so many young people don’t vote in reality, the polls tended to overestimate the support received by Labour and underestimate the support received by the Tories. This doesn’t mean that polls can never be relied upon again, but it does mean that polling companies will have to come up with more sophisticated methodologies.

 

Lesson One: To quote The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” The Conservatives had always been on course for a majority in May because the people who said they would vote Conservative actually showed up to vote. There really is only one poll that matters.

 

Irish Referendum

22 May 2015

Sometimes the trouble with an election is that the people speak, but it’s not always possible to agree on what they said. Did they vote for Party A because its leader seemed stronger than Party B’s? Did they like its education policy? Was it all about the economy? Or did they vote for it because their local MP helped deliver a new bypass in the constituency? Party politics and representative democracy can be messy. Referendums and direct democracy, however, help to remove any ambiguity behind what ‘the people’ actually say.

The voters of Ireland spoke loudly and clearly in May when they voted to legalise same-sex marriage. 62.1 percent of voters supported the change to the Constitution as proposed on the ballot paper: ‘Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.’ Perhaps one of the biggest stories behind the result was the relative absence of a split between cosmopolitan Dublin and rural Ireland: a majority of voters in 25 out of Ireland’s 26 counties supported changing the Constitution.

As a rule of thumb, a referendum isn’t usually the best way to extend minority rights. By definition, a referendum is majoritarian. It’s a blunt instrument, and any campaign might simply antagonise the majority against the minority. That’s why the Irish referendum was so powerful. It demonstrated that after months of deliberation and heated debate between citizens, the majority saw the rights of a minority as important enough to deserve equal recognition. North of the border, the pressure to legalise same-sex marriage will continue to grow. As Mike Nesbitt told the UUP Conference in November that opponents of same-sex marriage would end up “on the wrong side of history.” So far every motion on the issue has failed in the Assembly. If it were in the hands of the people instead of the politicians, the Republic’s referendum shows that the people might say something quite different.

 

Lesson Two: Irish voters are more likely to make up their own minds than ever before. Many Ulster Unionists resisted Home Rule in 1912 because they feared ‘Rome Rule’. Over a hundred years later, it’s pretty clear from this referendum result that the Irish Republic is no Catholic theocracy.

 

Canadian Federal Election

19 October 2015

“Canada had an election in 2015?” I hear you ask. Canada often gets unfairly overlooked, not least because its somewhat noisier neighbour tends to get all the attention. The late Robin Williams once compared Canada to a quiet loft apartment over a great party. It’s easy to forget the upstairs neighbour when a party’s going on downstairs. We still have another ten months to go before America elects its next president, and already the frontrunners are household names worldwide. Of course, it helps that a lot of people had heard of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before either of them entered the 2016 race, but even so. It’s clear where the party’s happening.

Above the never-ending party, something big happened back in October. For all the noise and fun and games happening below, what happened in Canada was pretty big. The country elected a new Liberal government under the young and charismatic Justin Trudeau, marking an end to nine years of a Conservative government under Stephen Harper. When the election campaign started, it was a proper three-way race. The incumbent Conservatives, centrist Liberals, and centre-left NDP all had a genuine chance of forming Canada’s next government. But all had liabilities: Canadians were growing increasingly weary of a Harper government, 43-year-old Justin Trudeau was laughed at by his opponents as ‘just not ready’, and the union affiliations of the NDP raised suspicions that it might be a little too left wing for Canada.

Three things fell into place for Trudeau. First, the economy started heading into recession territory, so the Conservatives lost their strongest advantage. Second, the NDP’s early support began to collapse, making the Liberals easily the firm choice for voters wanting a change of government. Finally, a series of calm, confident and coherent debate performances by Trudeau helped to convince many Canadians that he could actually make a good prime minister. His opponents had spent years telling Canadians that he ‘just isn’t ready’. They thought they were damaging him. In fact, they were merely lowering expectations. When Trudeau exceeded them, it seemed like he was ready after all.

He’s had a solid start in his first couple of months in the new job, showing a lead in global climate change negotiations, welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada, and improving relations with the United States. When he was asked by a journalist why he felt it was important to appoint an equal number of men and women to his Cabinet, Trudeau coolly replied, “Because it’s 2015.” If you hadn’t heard of Trudeau in 2015, get ready for that to change in 2016. Because Canada’s back.

 

Lesson Three: Don’t underestimate anyone in politics. It’s easy to write people off if they don’t conform to what came before. But if they find themselves in the right circumstances, they’ll have the last laugh.

 

 

I hope you enjoyed my take on three of the biggest election results of 2015. I will post a sequel article in the next few days on three elections to look out for in 2016.