Tactical Accuracy

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How accurate were the tactical voting site recommendations in 2019?

Here are all of the recommendations from all of the tactical voting sites. If they advised voting for the candidate with the best chance of beating the Tories (or similar eg DUP) we have classed it as correct and if they have advised another candidate we have classed it as incorrect.

If a site made it clear tactical voting was not needed in a seat because it was safely progressive, and a progressive candidate won, we also considered it correct.

None of the sites made recommendations in every seat. This is either because it was a "safe seat" where tactical voting is not needed or effective, or more rarely, because it was too close to call.

99.5%

Our accuracy

Gave advice in 564 seats (out of 650) scroll below this table for more info

561 Right

3 Wrong

Constituency	Correct Choice	TacticalVote.co.uk	Best For Britain (GetVoting.org)	tactical.vote	Remain United (remainunited.org)	People's Vote (tactical-vote.uk)

A Closer Look

East Londonderry

In this seat, the DUP won quite comfortably with 15,765 votes. SDLP were second with 6,158 votes and Sinn Féin (who we recommended) were third with 6,128 votes, only 30 votes behind SDLP. Sinn Féin suffered a large loss of support in this seat that we did not predict; in 2017 they were 6,458 votes ahead of the SDLP. However, even if we had recommended SDLP, it would not have been enough for them to beat the DUP this time.

Isle of Wight

The Tories won in this seat with over 50% of the vote. It was not possible for tactical voting to beat the Tories here without some Conservative voters switching to a remain or people's vote supporting party. With the Liberal Democrats standing down, this meant the party with the best chance of enticing remain voting Tories would have been the Greens. Especially as the Liberal Democrats endorsed the Greens here. In the end, remain supporting Tories did not switch allegiance. Labour came second to the Tories here with Greens in third.

South East Cornwall

Again, the Conservatives won over 50% of the vote so it would have been impossible for tactical voting to have an effect here. We predicted that the Liberal Democrats would come second in this seat as it used to be a Lib Dem/Tory swing seat, however Labour came second this time.

Other tactical voting sites that made recommendations in these 3 seats also made the same calls as us. They were very tricky seats to call, as they were quite safely Tory or DUP and predicting second place in a safe seat is notoriously difficult. We try not to make recommendations in this type of seat, however we felt there was a small chance of Tory remainers backing other parties. This did not happen in the end.