Together, we did it
1.5 million people looked up their tactical vote on our StopTheTories.Vote website in the General Election, and it’s obvious that millions more saw our guidance shared on campaign flyers, across social platforms and in group chats, because millions of people voted tactically to remove 251 Tories from power. It’s fair to say they were obliterated at the general election.
Here are a few top-line takeaways about the impact tactical voting had back in July 2024…
Accuracy
Our overall accuracy was an incredible 99.67% making us the most accurate tactical voting site in the 2024 general election. Which is pretty good if we do say so ourselves!
Everywhere we thought there was a chance a Tory or Reform candidate could win, our advice was correct. And no Tories or Reform candidates won in places where we reassured people they could vote with their hearts.
(Thank you to Tactical Vote for working with us to ensure our voting advice was accurate and the sites didn’t clash.)
Plaid Cymru and the SNP
For starters, Wales is now completely Tory free. 🎉
Tactical voting didn’t just help Labour - in Wales Plaid Cymru took Ynys Môn from the Tories by only 637 votes. In Scotland the SNP took Aberdeenshire North and Moray East from the Tories by just 942 votes.
Labour's "landslide"
Although Labour doubled their number of MPs, they received fewer votes than in 2019, this is exactly what an efficient, tactical, smartly redistributed opposition vote looks like. Many seats were very close and couldn’t have kept a Tory out without tactical voting - without all of you!
The closest race was in Hendon where the Labour candidate won by only 15 votes. We had over 1000 people check the advice for the tactical vote in Hendon, which prevented Sunak advisor Ameet Jogia from getting into power.
Big Liberal Democrat wins
Whether you voted tactically yourself, swapped your vote, or helped us spread the word, collectively we made a huge difference in many seats. One of the most popular ones was Mid Sussex where over 10,000 people checked our advice. We helped the Lib Dem candidate well and truly beat the Conservatives there with the winning margin being 6662 votes.
Because people knew to vote Lib Dem in so many places rather than Labour to get their Tory out, it resulted in their largest number of Lib Dem seats ever (up from 11 MPs to 72!).
This “efficient” voting partly explains why Labour’s vote share actually went down, and all opposition party MP numbers went up. This is our power under a broken electoral system.
Confidence to vote Green
We believe our advice was also crucial in the new Green seats of Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire. There aren’t often many opportunities where a Green candidate can win, but we correctly identified this and thankfully you all trusted us and with a lot of hard work from the Greens, they pulled it off!
Greens also came second in many places where we confirmed that a tactical vote wasn’t necessary, where some lucky constituencies could vote with their heart even though our election system usually forces you to vote against people rather than for them.
It’s worth noting that YouGov revealed that 1 in 5 voters planned to vote tactically, and 3 in 10 Green voters were most likely to vote tactically. Under a more proportional system and representative media, Greens would get far more attention (at least as much as Reform & The Think Tanks) and power.
An anti-right-wing coalition
Labour won 290 more seats than the Tories, and while we don't think we can take credit for all of those, by working together we had an important impact on the outcome of the election.
We demonstrated the large anti-right-wing coalition in this country that has always shown up, a movement that votes how it has to to effect change, and stands together against the advance of the parties on the right.
Power, local impact and representation
By voting together we haven't changed the outcome in terms of which party has overall power, but we've changed the make-up of parliament drastically to be more representative of the people who work in this country.
And that’s incredibly important, because our electoral system is extremely unrepresentative. Here are some examples of the impact of tactical voting in specific seats:
- A former NHS mental health nurse (Labour, Ashford) is sat in parliament, instead of a business and financial journalist.
- There’s an MP with a background of working for charities (Green, North Herefordshire) instead of a former trader for an investment bank.
- There’s an MP who ran a women’s refuge (Lib Dem, North East Hampshire) instead of a former banker. This was Alex Brewer and she won by 634 votes. We had 5300 people visit our site to see who to vote for here.
Thank yous
Thank you to everyone who supported us, everyone who shared our message or followed our advice. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.
And a big shout out to Carol Vorderman whose backing helped us spread the word more than anyone else. Carol firmly believes that Proportional Representation and other upgrades to the way our elections work may save us from a right wing hell!
In July we showed just how powerful our vote can be. And we’ll keep doing it, until we get the change we need. Stay tuned for further details because we’re not going anywhere! It’s time to hold Labour accountable and fight for a fairer democracy.
The future
We create tools to empower voters and there are a fair few costs involved to deliver this for free. Please consider paying it forward and chipping in the price of a coffee… or if you’re loaded, maybe the price of a suitcase of wine!
Not only will we be fighting local elections every year, keeping out the Tories AND Reform (who can both still win power on a minority of the vote), we’re also giving vital advice on local by-elections and are already planning our next General Election campaign. If you can help - please do.
Our votes are our power.
Final facts
- Overall accuracy was 99.67%
- We gave 609 recommendations in total
- No advice given in 23 seats which were too hard to call - we plan on being able to advise everywhere next time
- No advice in given in Northern Ireland (18 seats)
- We got 2 seats wrong where we gave advice to vote for a specific party, but a progressive candidate won anyway so no Tories were “let in” by the advice. In these seats (North Ayrshire & Arran and Dewsbury & Batley) we should have allowed people to vote with their hearts (i.e. vote for anyone)
- 3 MPs won by fewer than 40 votes
- The lowest margin was Hendon with 15 votes. We had over 1000 website visitors for Hendon. Seats like this we can comfortably say we helped tip over the edge and win.
- No seat had fewer than 600 unique visitors on our site
- Most seats had well over 1000 visitors, with some even having 10s of thousands
- We most likely had the biggest impact in seats that were really close. 56 seats had a margin of less than 5% between progressives and the Tories (There were more seats with a margin of less than 5% but they could have been between Labour and Green for example, and we didn't give advice in those seats)
You can find our 2024 General Election recommendations here: