What does the victory of Donald Trump have in common with Notley’s orange wave in Alberta and the majority government of Justin Trudeau?
All were surprise electoral results. All led to reflexive analysis about the big changes in the electorate that they signaled. But that’s not what I see. What I see are the quirks of first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. In the US electoral votes are awarded state-by-state (with the exception of Maine and Nebraska) as winner-take-all aka FPTP. President-Elect Trump won a landslide in the Electoral College, which looks like a clear indication of the citizens choice. However, first-past-the-post or winner-take-all can give you wildly varying results that hinge on the change of a disproportionally small vote change.
Has the election of Donald Trump signaled that Americans want revolution? To some degree, but keep in mind that Secretary Clinton won the popular vote comfortably and that Donald Trump received a million fewer votes than the 2012 darling of the GOP establishment, Mitt Romney–hardly a clear signal about what Americans want. Consider this, if one voter out of 100 had switched their votes from Donald Trump to Secretary Clinton (a 2-point swing) she would have won, the polls would have been dead on and everyone would have been talking about the solidification of America’s progressive trajectory.
Now did the Notley wave signal that Alberta, the fortress of conservatism, had been harboring a silent progressive majority? Hardly–conservative parties received way more votes than the NDP. Prime Minister Trudeau is acting like he’s got a clear mandate to implement his progressive agenda only because he is blinded by the disproportionate power he has in the House of Commons. In 2015 the Liberals doubled their vote percentage (18% to 39%), but received five times the number of MPs! (34 to 184). Both Notley’s and Trudeau’s legislative power is based on a warped reflection of the electorate. We need a better mirror.
It’s always tricky to understand the intention of any electorate. Even more so when first-past-the-post gives us unexpected results like these. All three leaders will move/have moved forcefully to implement their agenda. However, instead they should be very careful because the power given to them is due to an oddity of our current system. Their power is not proportional to the power indicated by the voters. They all have a free hand legislatively and if history repeats itself they will all overplay it. Nothing against these three leaders since this problem has been with us for a long time.
Those Medicine Hatters horrified at the election of Donald Trump are the very same people who were tickled pink at the surprise election of Rachel Notley. Yet the mechanism of both victories is the same and highlights the biggest flaw of first-past-the-post. The unpredictability of FPTP is precisely what’s wrong with our current systems. Politics is not gambling.
The result is that successive governments often lurch between the left and the right. Each small change in votes tips the pendulum, which then swings wildly. The fulcrum of legislative power is too sensitive. Thus progress is halting, but it is only that our current system is holding us back. Legislative power must accurately reflect the power of the people. Right now it doesn’t provincially, federally or in the USA.
Medicine Hat News. November 15, 2016.