Some people who have been crunching the numbers came up with some good statistics. My personal favourite, and a small consolation for not winning a seat I didn’t expect to win, is that the Labour to Tory swing in Maidenbower was over 19% and therefore the highest in the town and one of the highest in the country. I haven’t checked just in case the maths is wrong.

I did have a little look at the old Maidenbower results though. In 2010 (which had a high turnout obviously) Peter Smith got Labour got 1289 votes for Labour, so there are at least 1289 people there who would consider voting for us. If only we knew who they were and got them out to vote this year it would have been enough to win!

Another interesting statistic was the overall vote. In the past the Tory leader has always taken great pleasure in pointing out that the total Tory vote was higher then the total Labour vote. Meaningless in local elections really, and distorted during elections by thirds depending on which 2-seat wards didn’t have an election that year. This year the total Labour vote was nearly 900 higher than the total Tory vote. Still meaningless in my opinion, but at least it is meaningless in the right direction.

These results don’t help predict which county seats are most winnable next year because the county seats are not just combinations of borough seats: some are combinations of parts of borough seats. There are a couple of pleasing direct comparisons though.

Broadfield. In the last county elections the Tories won 1367 to 963. Add together this year’s Broadfield North & South results and you get Labour ahead by 1383 to 802 so that is looking good for next year.

Tilgate and Furnace Green. Assumed to be safe by the Tories. In the last county elections they won by 1600 to 871. Add together this year’s Tilgate result and last year’s Furnace Green result (there was no election there this year) and you get Labour on 1600 and the Tories on 1518 – and remember that a lot of that is based on last year’s Furnace Green result before the coalition really fell out of favour. It could well have been worse for them if they had an election there this year, so that seat could well be winnable too.

Since the last county elections Labour have won seats back in Ifield, Northgate and Gossops Green and shrunk the gap in Three Bridges so we could have our eye on the Gossops Green + Ifield West seat and the Northgate + Three Bridges seat. At the moment Labour only have two seats on the whole of the county council so having four potential targets in one town is very encouraging. The fact that some of those seats are occupied by this blog’s least favourite Tories is just a bonus.

Best of all, it is possible the Tories were faloling into our old trap of feeling over-confident or complacent. At the very least they may find themselves having to work hard to try and protect seats they may have taken for granted before. If that means they are not able to concentrate a lot of their resources on Southgate like they seem to have done this time, maybe we will finally crack that nut as well.

We now have a situation where there are 5 split wards which have both Tory and Labour councillors. Four of them were, I think, recently all-Tory wards and all of them have had Labour wins as their most recent result. We only need to gain three of them to regain control of the council.

But what about Southgate? That ward stubbornly refuses to change hands. It used to be all-Labour (as most of the town was at one point) then started to swing both ways and it has now been all-Tory for a few years. My one firm prediction about our local elections was that at least one ward would end up with a majority of less than 50. I was wrong and this year the narrowest margin was the 66 votes in Southgate. So why didn’t we win it this time?

Raj got a little bit closer than last time in terms of the absolute size of the margin but in percentage terms it is almost exactly the same as 2011, just on a greatly reduced turnout. Why is it that the swings we see elsewhere in the town, and the country as a whole, aren’t happening there too?

I don’t like to over-analyse election results. I think its pointless trying to second-guess the electorate by over-simplifying it all. In Southgate there were 2068 votes cast and probably more than 2000 different reasons for why those votes were cast the way they were. But I think there are probably four factors that contributed.

The biggest one is probably the presence of the Greens in Southgate, with a well-known candidate – the local vicar who is an ex-Labour councillor. While Labour and the Tories have been on 41% and 44% for the last two years, the Greens have polled 14%. If you assume that the Greens take more votes from Labour than the Tories that alone could explain the difficulty there.

Another big factor was probably the rehabilitation centre that was mootted for East Park. It became a well-publicised possibility in the run up to the election and while I don’t think any candidate was in favour of it, it was the Tory who took most advantage and was prominent in the campaign to stop it.

There are three other factors which may or may not have contributed. Both are a bit nebulous, if that is the right word, but you can see the effect when there are all-out elections or when a by election happens along with the normal one.

It sounds silly, but alphabetical order seems to have a small impact. When there two candidates from the same party there is a tendency for the one who comes first on the polling slip to get more votes. It doesn’t make sense to those of us who use both our votes for the same party but it seems to happen. It is probably a coincidence that the first few letters of the alphabet are over-represented in the surnames of councillors. I reckon the alphabet effect could account for a small handful of votes.

Another factor is the doesn’t-live-here factor. Some voters have a real reluctance to vote for candidates who do not live in the area they are looking to represent. In this case I know the Green does live in Southgate, the Labour candidate lives in Furnace Green and I’m not sure where the Tory lives. At the very least this could account for a few Green votes that might otherwise have gone Labour.

The last factor is a bit less amusing. It is the racial aspect. Again, where there are elections where two candidates from the same party appear, there is a distinct tendency for the one with the less ‘English’ name to poll fewer votes, all other things being equal. I’m not suggesting there is a consciously racist motivation at work, but there could be an inclination to be less likely to vote for a name that is unfamiliar or that you can’t pronounce. Mind you, the BNP have stood in Southgate before and got a handful of votes, would those erstwhile BNP voters have voted deliberately against Raj or just stayed at home along with the majority of voters? Nobody knows, but if the foreign-sounding name factor cost a dozen votes it could account for a chunk of the small margin.

When the gap is only 66 votes a few factors that can cost maybe 10 votes each can be significant. Or perhaps I am just talking out of my backside. It does happen.

The other noteworthy ward was Maidenbower, for personal reasons. I was standing there and didn’t win. I didn’t expect to of course, but considering we did no work there I think 425 votes was respectable. considering the shockingly low turnout. In percentage terms it is about 5 points up on last year. I feel a bit sorry for the voters of Maidenbower. They must feel a bit ignored really. We don’t put in a lot of work there because our limited resources are better used in places where we are likely to win – which worked out well for us this time. I guess the Tories also have limited manpower and will also concentrate on the marginals so safer seats like Maidenbower get ignored are engaged with less than voters in, say, Ifield or Gossops Green. No wonder the turnout was so low. If the parties can’t be bothered with the voters why should the voters be bothered with the parties?

I imagine the Tories do engage a bit more with Maidenbower, but then they have two councillors who are effectively being paid to so I hope that is the case. In the absence of more proportional voting methods I can’t see it changing, which is a shame. I’d like to think that if we spent a couple of years identifying our potential voters there we could make it a lot closer. If the Maidenbower branch expands a little and gets more active maybe that will start to happen.

I think a lot of my colleagues will, like me, wish next year was another borough election rather than the county – although we have to have a good chance now of at least doubling the Labour presence in Chichester.

For various personal reasons I won’t go into, I wasn’t hugely involved in the Labour campaign this time round, but from what I saw of it we have finally started doing it right. We started early and have got more into the mindset of permanent campaigning. We also selected earlier which really helps, and we selected good candidates in the main wards who all led their own campaigns from the front. As long as we continue to take it seriously like that it all bodes well for the future.

In this story the Tory leader was very keen to point out that they are doing ‘positive campaigning’.   It made me wonder exactly how you define negative and positive campaigns and…  if you go out of your way to stress that your campaign is positive isn’t there an implication that your opponents are indulging in a negative campaign?  Doesn’t that make it a very subtle form of trashing your opponents and thereby indulging in some sort of negative campaigning yourself?

And that is without going into the debate about whether positive is necessarily good and negative necessarily bad.   Saying what you are going to do is not very positive in retrospect if you then do the opposite, as Nick Clegg and his collegues have discovered.

Still, at least they are doing it subtly now instead of just making up rubbish.  Or is the absence of blatant lying in the literature just a sign that there is no election in Broadfield thisyear?

While out canvassing in Crawley some of my colleagues commented on how the atmosphere was more like that for a general election than for locals, certainly the activity is impressive.   Only one casualty that I know of, when one of our councillors got her finger bitten by a dog on Saturday.   Morale was boosted a bit by seeing the Tory literature which still contains the web address of a German porn site on it.

The Register had the story back in January, and it subsequently appeared as a prominent story in the County Times, but the local Tories appear oblivious to all that and continue putting that URL on their leaflets,  Or maybe they just like German porn?

Over in Horsham it is the Lib Dems producing the leaflets worthy of comment.  In Park ward they have one of their famous bar charts (surely the biggest argument for AV is that in killing off tactical voting the dreaded Lib Dem bar charts will be collateral damage) which show the Lib Dems just a few percentage points behind the Tories.  The thing is… Park ward has three Lib Dem councillors as far as I know. How they managed to get councillors with a lower share of the vote under any system is a mystery…

Unlike Crawley, which elects by thirds and therefore has an election of some sort every year, Horsham council has all-out elections so this is the only chance for four years to make any change to the council make-up and they are going for it over there, which is good to see.   Labour is putting up candidates in most wards and even has a full slate of three in one ward.

With a large area to cover, low membership, low funds and not much chance of success there has not always been a lot of effort in Horsham but they are really doing as much as they can with their resources.  The funds raised by the quiz night have been put to good use.  The election addresses in the wards they are putting more effort into are a lot better than the one I had for the general election last year, which was the best we could afford at the time, and they are actually knocking on doors and doing proper canvassing, which is good to see.

Obviously they are making use of all the new members gained since this time last year, and in a way that should keep them involved and maybe attract even more people to the party.  If Labour win even one seat in Horsham, or even come a respectable second anywhere it will be an historic result and good luck to them.

Over here I’m hoping we will hold on to what we have and pick up a few extra seats.  We have some candidates who will greatly enhance the Labour group and the council itself if they get elected.   I’m not singling anybody out, but they know who they are.

The referendum looks like being a bit of a non-event though.  Only one person I spoke to in all canvassing sessions mentioned it.

• Libya – I can’t see our involvement there ending well.
• Referendum – I’ll be voting yes
• Local elections – Lib Dems won’t do well (though they got wiped out in Crawley ages ago so nothing to see here – but could be interesting in Horsham, though probably to the Tories’ advantage there)
• Japan – hasn’t made me more worried about nuclear power
• Miliband – I think he is doing as well as he needs to, and no problem with him speaking in Hyde Park
• UK Uncut – good for them!
• Koran burning – stupid stunt, but why didn’t the Taliban just retaliate by burning a bible or two?
• Rooney – why wasn’t he banned for that elbowing off the ball?  Surely a worse offence than swearing.
• Big society – when will the penny finally drop that you can’t solve every problem by throwing less money at it?

The data is available as a Google Doc here and you can download it all to your own computer to pull it about in Excel.¹One reason I was pleased to see it was that it gave me a chance to play with Excel 2010.  I installed it the other day, having bought Office 2010 Professional for the bargain price of £8.95 but haven’t had a reason to use it before now.

The reason for my surprise was to do with just how much informatin about the party is contained in it.  The spreadsheet effectively gives the membership of every constituency party in the country!   I know the party is gloating a bit about how many extra members have joined this week, but I’m not sure that, say, Banff & Buchan CLP really want it know that their membership is lower than that of Broadfield.

According to the figures, there were 178 ballot papers sent out in Horsham.  It might not sound like a lot, but I reckon that when I was selected there were fewer than 150 members so a 20% increase is good to see, especially in a constituency where there has never been an MP or councillor.

A few thougths about the voting and the results, illustrated by charts, because I wanted to play with charts.

There has been a lot of talk about ‘the unions’ winnng it for Ed Miliband.  This gives the impression (deliberately? or just conveniently for those in the media with their own agenda?) that there is still the old-fashioned block votes.  Of course, as anyone involved should know, the union section of the electoral college is based on one-member-one-vote, which does not blindly follow whateverthe union leaders say anyway.  I’m pretty loyal to my union, but still voted for Ed Balls despite their endorsement of Ed M.

The weird thing is that if there is anything remotely resembling a block vote now it is in the MP/MEP section, where each individual’s vote carries as much weight as hundreds or thousands in the other sections.

Anyway. Time for a chart:

Actual votes in the leadership ballot

This shows the actual votes cast, without any sort of weighting for the three sections.  It shows the first preference votes, where Ed M had something like 11,000 more votes than David M in the first round.   Another way of looking at it is in percentage terms:

First preference votes as a percentage

The blue columns show the results of the first chart with the percentage of actual votes cast.  The red columns show how the percentage actually used in the ballot.  The difference is mainly because the tiny green slivers in the first chart, which represent the MP/MEP votes actually count as much as the other sections.

None of this proves anything really, just that making charts in Excel is easy and fun.  It does show that whichever way you look at it, the race between David and Ed was close.  Neither candidate was particularly unpopular in any section of the electoral college.  The spreadsheet lists the individual preferences of all the MPs and MEPs so you can see how a lot of them who had Ed 1st had David 2nd and vice versa.

I do think there is something wrong with the way the weighting is done though, and not just because the MP section is worth a third of the vote even with only 266 members.  That would not be so bad if it was a secret ballot on their part.  I think that must skew the results a lot.  Maybe I am being unnecessarily cynical, but if everyone knows how you voted and you might want favours from the new leader, wouldn’t it be tempting to vote for who you think will win rather than who you want to win?  (Granted, the two might be the same.)

I will leave it to somebody with more time on their hands than me to work out whether all those who are likely contenders for shadow cabinet positions just happened to vote for the person who looked most likely to win for the last 4 months…

I think that is my main conclusion: the MP section should certainly be a secret ballot and should probably have a reduced significance.  Yes, I know all the arguments about how the MPs will know the candidates better and have a more informed opinion, and how they have to work with the leader, but is does that outweigh the principle of democracy?

The other stunning statistic from the mass of numbers is the turnout in the affiliates section: just 9%.   The highest turnout from a union was ASLEF with 25%, but the larger unions all had a turnout of around 10%.

My own union had nearly 950,000 voted not used.  Back when there were block votes those votes would have all been cast on our behalf, and not necessarily the way we would have wanted them cast, which was recognised as unfair.

There is a bit of irony in all this.   A union could have ballotted its members and then thrown its whole block behind whoever the most members wanted, even though in a 5-horse race like this it could have been nothing like a majority.  Unfair? Certainly, but it is just like first past the post when you think about it, and I suspect that those who objected most loudly about it are those who are the most enthusiastic supporters of FPTP in other areas like general elections.

What occurred to me was that the unions didn’t really win it for Ed, but if they had really put their minds to it all those members could have won it for whoever they wanted to.  What is all the 91% or non-voters in that section had all voted for Diane Abbott?

I’m not saying they should have done, but it is a bit like the country as a whole – there is a huge mass of people who have the power to decide who is in charge and they never take advantage of their numbers.

1. or Open Office of course

I don’t think it would have changed my mind, I was very relieved to find that Balls justified my decision to give him my first preference, but I would have welcomed the chance to see this beforehand.  The local hustings in Crawley had proxies for four of the candidates, which isn’t the same really.  OK, so I could have travelled to one of the events in London or elsewhere in the South but I didn’t.

One thing did occur to me during the show: when the time comes to make a movie of this competition, as it surely will, I think David M should be played by Rowan Atkinson and Ed M by David Baddiel.  Not sure about the rest of the casting yet. Nothing sprang to mind immediately.

Maybe not as exciting as the goings on up in Rugby, but still something quite strange is going on.   There is no suggestion that this action of Goldsmiths was an official council decision, or discussed with the leaders of opposition parties, or even other memebrs of the Tory party.   Be interesting to hear the details when they eventually slip out.

As for the byelections, we have two in Crawley.

One is on the borough council, where one of the Tory councillors for Tilgate has decided to resign because he can’t fit in the council work, the day job and the family, and the other is on the county coucil where Henry Smith has finally stood down after being elected to parliament.

I guess Labour should have some chance in Tilgate.  The area always used to be Labour and since the Tories got in there they have had some fairly poor councillors, from what I have heard.  I think the Tories peaked locally a year or two ago, and have been shedding council seats across the country by the hundred so that combined with the poor performance of the Tilgate Tories must help us.

If history is any guide then Maidenbower is a dead cert for the Tories, which is a shame.  It is always a shame when a Tory wins aywhere, of course, but especially so here because of the candidate.  Given the past performance this is about as close to a guaranteed win as you can get in local elections and so a chance for them to get somebody new into local politics.

Instead they have selected somebody who is already a borough councillor.  Not only that, but he is the leader of the council, Bob Lanzer.  Now I quite like Bob, and while the Tilgate Tory whose name escapes me finds it hard to fit being a backbench councillor into his life alongside his day job, Bob seemed to have no trouble fitting in ward matters and being in the shadow executive alongside his job.  Going by the register of interests it looks like he has given up the day job now he is the leader, which would be understandable.

I don’t agree with the direction Bob wants to take the council but I have no doubt in his abilities to take it in those directions, but would county councillor just be a job too many?

As a rule, I don’t like having councillors on both the county and borough council anyway if it can be avoided.  With so few people willing to stand these days apparently it can’t be avoided, but I don’t think it is a good thing for all sorts of reasons that I have blathered on about before.  Usually when it happens the person represents the same area at both levels but in this case Bob would represent Pound Hill & Worth on one authority and Maidenbower on another – so two lots of constituents to deal with.

As leader of the council he will have all sorts of unavoidable meetings with auditors and the like, and visits to the represent Crawley at the LGA.  These things happen during the daytime and can be arranged around council meetings, but the county council does all its business during the day.  I can’t see there not being clashes and when that happens he is likely to prioritise the borough committments – there are enough Tories in county hall that they can afford to have a dozen absent and still win any vote going.

I’m sure Bob would be a good county councillor without the weight of responsibilites of being leader of the borough council, but as it stands I think this is an unwise move.  Unless he is expecting to not be leader of the borough at some point in the not-too-distant future…  perhaps he is anticipating a wipe-out in next year’s borough elections? 

If, by ‘internet election’ people mean that voters will all surf the net, visiting all the parties’ web sites, following all their local candidates’ Twitter feeds and reading their blogs and discussions on their Facebook groups, then making their minds up based on that and direct marketing-type e-mails then not only was 2010 not the internet election but neither will any future election be it either.

Back in June the Hansard Society posted something about 10 online campaigning lessons learned from the 2010 election.  None of them seem to be wrong, but they don’t go anywhere near giving a complete picture.  I did like number 2 though:

The more effective the tool, the less sexy it is; Think databases and email.

So true.  We are still a long way from having the whole country online, and even futher from having all the online people using the internet to find out about politics.  It will probably never happen.  A smart website might look good and be well-received by the small percentage of the population that see it, but you will get far more benefit from a decent database that records where your supporters are, where the floating voters are, and manages how you can target yoru message to them – whether it is by new technology, old technology or no technology.

Where the internet, backed up by well-organised information, can have most use for political parties is in co-ordinating and directing their other activities.  Even if elections continue to be won and lost on the doorsteps that does not mean the Luddites are right – internet-based activity can encourage more people to get involved in the old-fashioned grass roots campaigning and get them allocated in the most effective way.

Having said that, there are ways in which future elections could become very different, thanks to the internet, and 2010 showed signs of how that could happen.  There were many single-issue campaigns that used the APIs of the various MySociety projects to good effect – some better than others.   As a candidate I received plenty of emails generated by websites about topics like hunting, Trident, Robin Hood taxes, and many others.

There was some official party advice about responding to such emails, but I expect the advice will be very different next time round.

Each campaign had slightly different tactics and all had some good and bad points.  In the future there may come to be some sort of standard, taking the best points of each campaign, and maybe there will be a lot more aggregation of campaigns.  It will be harder for candidates to justify a position of not answering these questions, and it will be easier to find their answers.

In return, these online campaigns will have to make it easier for candidates to respond.  Some of the emails I got were expecting me to follow a link to a pdf file containing a pledge of some sort or other, print it out, sign it, and post or fax it back somewhere.  Who has time for that if they are receiving dozens of emails a day?   Even incumbent MPs will find it hard, let alone candidates who still have a day job to do and no administrative support.

I think there has to be a certain understandable reluctance on the part of candidates to want to make pledges on everything as well.  They may have an opinion on something but not a huge amount of knowledge and will not want to be committing to anything they might find out to be impractical.  For example, there were campaigns asking candidates to pledge to join a particular all-party group on some topic.  As a non-anorak I don’t even know if I can promise that – I don’t know if these groups have limits, I don’t know how many you can join, how much time they take up, and so on.

The other frustration for a candidate was receiving the same email many, many times after having responded once.   This could have been improved by having the web site record the first response so that subsequent visitors would give their postcode and then be told what their candidates think instead of just generating a new email.  Far more efficient.

The top tip for candidates is to save all your responses and then when duplicastes come along you can copy and paste from earlier emails.   It saves time and keeps you consistent – it feels wrong to not reply personally, but get over that: the questions were computer-generated text after all.

The next stage of all this will be when the collated responses are kept and compared to voting records to hold MPs to account – and perhaps this is where the real reluctance to reply comes from.   It is already easy now to look up MPs’ voting records, in the future it will be as easy to compare their voting records to what they said in elections.

I think this is where the internet will make the most visible difference: not in the political parties’ campaigns but in the campaigns of pressure groups and other single-issue groups.  Most of these had electronic campaigns that looked like they were knocked up when the 2010 election was called.  In the future they will be written beforehand, and be better.

That doesn’t mean the political parties will not see the internet change what they do, but it will not replace the knock on the door, the phone call or the leaflet through the letterbox.  If we all just sat at home and blogged, tweeted and commented on forums we would not achieve anything.  Those things have their place, but their impact is largely second-hand.

There are many excellent political blogs out there, but their postings will be read by a very, very small number of non-aligned voters – probably a statistically insignificant number.  So that brilliant post about the closure of a local hospital ward will not be read by any of the voters affected by it – but it *will* be read by people who are knocking on doors and will give them information to backup what they are saying and it will be read by some people who are then motivated to become one of those volunteers.  In some cases it may get picked up by a local newspaper – that is about the only time it will get to the attention of the floating voters, the few who actually read newspapers anyway.

All very rambling I know.  I may expand on one or two specific points in the future.  This is somethign I have been meaning to write about for a few months and never got round to.  I have finally done it in part as a response to comments from Richard Symonds on earier posts.

He has been complaining about a perceived lack of activity on behalf of the Labour party to the savage axe-swinging of the coalition.  One answer is that the actions that will make the difference are not necessarily the one that will be visible to him.  We could all write blog posts about how bad everything is, and lots of people do, but that is not going to get a message out to voters ready for when they have the opportunity to change the government.  That will be done by getting more individuals signed up to knock on those doors – which is happening.  I don’t know about Crawley, but the membership of Horsham party has increased by 15% since the election already. The next step is to get those new members (and the old ones) motivated to get out there and engage with voters directly.

All of that will be happening behind the scenes.

Owen’s response about what he is doing up in Rugby is interesting.  I’m sure he appreciates how few floating voters will read what he writes – but it is not wasted effort.  Knowing what is going on there may well persuade a few people to join up and I hope that anybody knocking on doors up there is a regular reader.

It is not clear how campaignign will change in the future and even less clear how I will fit into it – except that it will preferably not be as a candidate and will still involve a lot of footwork regardless of what I do online.