Tactical voting at the local and devolved elections 2026

“Tactical voting is nothing new in UK elections. People eschew their Party of preference in order to prevent a Party they dislike from winning. But with the UK Party system fragmenting, tactical voting has become a lot harder. Stephen Fisher finds little evidence of tactical voting in the local and devolved elections, and looks ahead to what that could mean for the next general election. Enjoying this post? Then sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. Many voters at last week’s local and devolved elections in Britain found themselves wondering who to vote for to stop some other party from winning. Tactical voting is nothing new, but with so much change in party support, it was often hard for voters to work out what to do. With different electoral systems and political circumstances, tactical voting played out very differently in England, Scotland, and Wales. Tactical voting in England At the local elections last year Reform UK won 41 per cent of the seats up and control of ten councils. With the party continuing to lead in the polls, many on the left were wondering how to vote to avoid their ward or their council being taken over by Reform. But the coordination problem on the left was complicated by the severe unpopularity of the Labour government, the Greens campaigning to replace Labour , and huge changes in party support leading to massive uncertainty as to who the top two parties would be. For instance, using detailed results collected by the BBC (the basis for all the analysis in this section) just 16 per cent of the wards where the Conservatives and Labour were the top two parties in 2022 still had the same top-two this year. The failure of the left to coordinate helped Reform win more seats. A coordinated or unified left could have halved the number of Reform gains. There is no sign of a tactical squeeze on the Liberal Democrat or Green vote in the wards Labour were defending against a strong Reform challenge; while the Greens did underperform their national average in wards Labour were defending and Reform came first or second, that is not evidence for Green to Labour tactical voting because it can be accounted for by the more general tendency of Greens to do less well in less urban and more Leave voting places. The failure of the left to coordinate helped Reform win more seats. A coordinated or unified left could have halved the number of Reform gains. By contrast, only about a third of seats won by a party of the left would have been beaten by a perfectly tactically coordinated right. Perhaps particularly worrying for the left is that one in five of the Reform gains this year were in places with more voters from the left than the right. Tactical voting in Scotland The Scottish National Party (SNP) asked voters to give them a majority in the Scottish Parliament with which to ask for another referendum on Scottish independence. The SNP’s quest may well have focused unionist minds on tactical voting in the constituencies. Relative to notional 2021 results for new boundaries calculated by Chris Hanretty, the four SNP losses to the Liberal Democrats were consistently accompanied by below average Conservative and Labour performances and above average increases in the Liberal Democrat vote, which on average suggest 2.4-point Conservative to Liberal Democrat and 2.6-point Labour to Liberal Democrat tactical swings. But in only two of those LD gains (Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch and Strathkelvin and Bearsden) does it appear that unionist anti-SNP tactical switching was pivotal to the Liberal Democrats winning those seats. The SNP failure to win an overall majority cannot be blamed on anti-SNP tactical voting by supporters of unionist parties, but it contributed. Tactical voting in Wales Last week Wales used a new proportional representation (PR) system for the Senedd elections. For its advocates, PR makes every vote count and remove incentives to vote tactically. But 18.7 per cent of votes were cast for Parties or candidates that did not win any seats in the constituency were the vote was cast, thus there was a substantial group with incentives to vote tactically. The SNP failure to win an overall majority cannot be blamed on anti-SNP tactical voting by supporters of unionist parties, but it contributed. With just six seats in each of sixteen constituencies, Jac Larner has shown it takes about 11 per cent of the vote to get a single seat in a constituency. So, supporters of parties and candidates that are expected to get less than 11 per cent face incentives to tactically switch to a more popular party. Also, under D’Hondt, the larger the party the more likely an additional vote is to yield an additional seat. But it is unlikely that was understood by many voters, given this survey showing little knowledge of the new electoral system. The effective 11 per cent threshold presented a formidable challenge to the Liberal Democrats whose 4.5 per cent of the vote would have yielded 4 seats under a pure proportional nationwide system. But only the party leader, Jane Dodds, won, and only just, with 11.8 per cent of the vote in Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd. Despite little prospect of Reform being able to command a majority in the Senedd, the apparently close race between Plaid Cyrmu and Reform seems to have led to “tactical” switching to Plaid to stop Reform winning. With polls and notional 2021 results suggesting at most one further Liberal Democrat seat gain, the party might have been expected to suffer tactical desertion in 14 of the 16 constituencies. Instead, their vote dropped by an average of just -0.1 points across those constituencies, little different to the +1.2-point average rise across their two target seats. An average of 3.5 per cent of voters continued to support the Liberal Democrats in places where they had no serious chance of winning a seat. While voting to influence who tops the poll when your vote might otherwise increase representation for your favourite party is not traditionally considered tactical voting by political scientists, it is nonetheless tactical in nature because people care about the symbolism of who wins. Despite little prospect of Reform being able to command a majority in the Senedd, the apparently close race between Plaid Cyrmu and Reform seems to have led to “tactical” switching to Plaid to stop Reform winning. Plaid out-performed the average of the polls by 4 points, while Labour, Green and Liberal Democrats were all down a point or two from their average in the final polls. That pattern suggests Plaid Cymru benefited from a relatively late anti-Reform tactical vote. In sum, although unionist tactical voting in Scotland made a modest contribution to the decline in SNP seats and anti-Reform tactical switching helped Plaid Cymru to victory, it is perhaps the absence of evidence for effective tactical voting in England that is most instructive. While Labour achieved a large majority in 2024 thanks to coordinated tactical voting between the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Labour, since then colossal changes in Party support in England meant voters at the local elections struggled to cast effective tactical votes to stop the rise of Reform. That could be repeated at the next general election, unless the left parties and their supporters find a way to work together again. Thanks to the BBC, John Curtice, Patrick English, Rob Ford, Lotte Hargrave and Stuart Perrett for help with the data. Enjoyed this post? Sign up to our newsletter and receive a weekly roundup of all our articles. All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Image credit: chrisdorney on Shutterstock The post Tactical voting at the local and devolved elections 2026 first appeared on LSE British Politics .

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