How tactical voting led to upsets in the UK and France

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #115: mythical monsters, judging AI, and how to grow your career
By Harris Sockel

Two political upsets happened over the last week:

• In the UK, 33.8% of people voted the Labour party back into power for the first time since 2010. Voter turnout in the UK was pretty weak — 59%, lower than any election in 23 years.
• France, on the other hand, saw its highest voter turnout in decades. A majority (26%) of voters there supported the New Popular Front — a political alliance that formed just last month (!) to block the far-right National Rally.

On Medium, dual national Benjamin Chadwick (who voted in both elections) sums up lots of people’s feelings leading up to last week: hope for the UK, fear for France. Polls clearly pointed toward a Labour victory in Britain, but in France the results were less certain. That probably explains voter turnout — hope and certainty don’t get people to the polls like fear.

Nigel Stanley, a former head of campaigning for the UK’s largest trade unions, goes deeper. He’s writing about the UK’s election results, but his observations apply to both countries: In “plurality” voting systems (where whoever gets the most votes wins) “tactical voting” can make or break an election. A “tactical vote” is when you don’t vote for who you want to win; instead, your mindset is more, “I’m voting to try and stop the party I don’t want to win.” Labour didn’t actually get more votes than they got in 2019, when they lost; they just… didn’t lose. Conservatives’ share of the vote went down because people voted, tactically, for other parties.

British voters have splintered into at least five factions over the last decade. Those splintering factions let Labour’s majority emerge. And this part of Stanley’s analysis was interesting to me, because I feel shades of it here in the U.S., and I think it’s relevant to how people tend to oversimplify voters’ motivations anywhere:

The point is that “the people” so often talked about by populists do not all agree or have the same interests. We have things in common, but also disagree about much and do not even split into two neat groups on the left and right. The art and science of modern politics is putting together a winning election coalition from enough voters from across these groups.

What else we’re reading

• Author Carlyn Beccia, whose latest children’s book covers the science and lore behind mythical monsters, details the real-life phenomena that (possibly) inspired Greek myths. A few mythical characters, like the Cyclops, might have been misinterpretations of ancient fossils (an elephant fossil looks like it has one eye, but the eye hole is a nasal cavity). Beccia writes: “The creative mind is always combining fragments of the known to construct the unknown.” Our worst fears often blend multiple things we’ve experienced in the past to create new (yet weirdly familiar) terrors.
• Amber Case crystallizes one of the main issues with ChatGPT that I’ve felt but haven’t been able to articulate: It’s too open-ended. The ask-me-anything user interface of ChatGPT is part of why some people have turned against it: “A lot of disappointment with artificial intelligence stems from people using GPT for tasks it’s not ideal for, getting mediocre or incorrect results, then negatively judging all of AI.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about being promoted

If you want to be promoted, the most important thing you can do is understand the business you’re in. Not your team, not your to-do list, but the business as a whole. Johnathan Nightingale, former VP of Firefox (now a leadership consultant and brilliant writer) advises: “Develop a genuine curiosity about how it all works, and keep going until you get it.”

Did someone forward you this email? Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

What do you think of this newsletter? Take this super quick survey to let us know.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com