1During the 2024 general election campaign, the until then serious, solemn and somewhat dull Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, deliberately fell off his paddleboard into lake Windermere to denounce sewage pollution in English waterways and bodies of water. He was later seen bungee-jumping off a crane in Eastbourne while asking British voters to take a chance and do something they had never done before: vote Liberal Democrat.
2Ed Davey’s antics summoned images of stability and instability, as he was regularly seen falling off and into things. The notion of stability, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “immunity from destruction or essential change; enduring quality”, is particularly relevant when studying the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, the party’s history has been defined by a constant tension between the threat of extinction and the hope for survival ever since the Liberal party’s fall from power in 1922 and through the successive waves of the Liberal Revival between the 1950s and 1970s. While in the early 20th century, the party was seen as the stable third force of British politics, its involvement in a Conservative-led coalition in 2010 led to its collapse in the 2015 general election when the party was left with 8 MPs and a damaged reputation, forcing it to once again struggle for survival. Less than ten years later, the “Liberal Democrat fightback” culminated in 2024 into the party’s best result in over a century, with 72 MPs and a return to third-party status in the House of Commons.
- 1 See for instance Paul Whiteley and Patrick Seyd,, “Labour’s Vote and Local Activism: The Impact of (...)
3While the party’s highly personalised air war garnered a lot of attention, it should not overshadow its particularly efficient and disciplined ground operation which, in the leadership’s own eyes, made such incredible results possible. We thus pay particular attention to the party’s activity in the constituencies, and to what the results will mean in future for the party on the ground. Indeed, “national” political campaigns do not exist in a vacuum, and political parties and scholars alike have recently come to gradually recognise the importance of ground campaigns.1 The 2024 general election proved that activists’ targeted efforts do allow parties to win certain seats and not others, as evidenced by the Lib Dem’s large increase, but also by the results obtained by the Greens and Reform.
- 2 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats: From Hope, to Despair, to W (...)
4With the notable exception of a monograph published in 20232, the party’s struggles since 2015 have coincided with a decline in academic interest. We thus seek to shed new light on both the significance and underlying meaning of the party’s performance, which can be construed in terms of stability and instability in three respects. First, it appears extraordinary and unprecedented, and as such breaks away with the party’s streak of poor performances since 2015. Second, it nevertheless hides several long-lasting difficulties that the party has not yet overcome, as well as new dilemmas that it will need to resolve. In that sense, finally, the result might be more lukewarm than it appears and might paradoxically threaten the stability of the party’s standing, as well as its future progress.
5In this article, I build on my own ethnographic research into the party. First, I use data collected through participant observation and qualitative interviews carried out during my PhD research into the party’s 2021 Greater London Authority campaign – especially in the later part of the article, on Proportional Representation (PR). I also use the insights gained through online ethnography over a period of five years, having notably attended a series of campaign meetings and gained access to a number of primary sources from the party, as well as monitoring members’ online interactions on the party’s informal networks. These insights allow me to compare and contrast the party’s 2024 campaign strategy and its results with previous general and other election campaigns in order to make better sense of how the party achieved such a performance and what the results might mean for the Liberal Democrats and the British party system more widely.
6I proceed in three stages. I first provide explanations to make sense of the result, focusing on the role of and interactions between the party’s efficient media campaign and highly disciplined ground campaign. Second, I shed light on several key weaknesses and dilemmas that the Liberal Democrats will – once again – need to tackle in the coming years. I pay particular attention to the party’s reliance on tactical voting and hence to the softness of its vote, its lack of a distinctive identity, and the challenges it will face to make progress against the two main parties. In a final part, I analyse the main tension revealed by the party’s performance: its attachment to PR despite its success under First-Past-the-Post (FPTP).
- 3 Liberal Democrats, Thornhill Review, 2020.
7Creating a winning strategy first involved taking stock of the 2019 general election and specifically learning from the mistakes the party had then committed. Building on the recommendations of the Thornhill Review3 and the working paper Winning At Every Level, both published in early 2020, the party’s 2024 strategy stood in stark contrast with 2019.
- 4 Robert Ford et al., The British General Election of 2019 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, (...)
- 5 Ibid., p. 183.
- 6 Liberal Democrats, Thornhill Review, 2020, p. 14 and 42.
- 7 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats, op. cit., p. 159.
- 8 John Curtice, “Gambling on Brexit: the Liberal Democrat performance in the 2019 general election”, (...)
8In the previous general election campaign, the party had focused on maximising its vote share to win the support of as many anti-Brexit voters as possible throughout the country. After having elected 703 councillors and finished second in the 2019 European elections with 19.6% of the vote and 16 MEPs a few weeks later, the party received encouraging MRP polls placing it ahead in 73 seats and within a five percent swing of a further 219 seats. Consequently, the party spread itself too thin by targeting too many seats (80 – divided into two tiers – against the 32 that had originally been designated), including many in which it had no established credibility, council or organisational presence on the ground, two preconditions of success for the party.4 This was particularly the case of the seats into which the Change UK defectors had been parachuted: while they looked promising on paper due to their pro-Remain profile, the new candidates lacked time to build relationships with activists and make themselves known and credible to voters on the ground.5 In many places, the inevitable lack of resources that resulted was compounded by the lack of communication and coordination between HQ and the field teams, with national and local literature often contradicting each other.6 More broadly, the leadership largely operated in silo of the rest of the party and led a hubristic campaign personalised around its leader, Jo Swinson, becoming the next Prime Minister even though the party was only represented by 21 MPs ahead of the general election. This “Swinsonisation”7 of the campaign, coupled with the party’s divisive Revoke policy and more broadly unclear Brexit stance8, and too heavy a reliance on rational arguments rather than emotion to oppose Brexit antagonised a lot of voters and led to its collapse.
- 9 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats, op. cit., p. 222 and follow (...)
- 10 Tim Bale, Aron, Cheung and Alan Wager, “Where next for the Liberal Democrats?”, UK in a Changing Eu (...)
- 11 Pete Dorey, “The Weakening of the Blue Wall”, UK Election Analysis 2024, https://www.electionanalys (...)
9Despite spending £14.4 million (more than Labour) and a 4.3 percentage points increase in vote share, it lost one MP compared to 2017, with 11 seats won, as Jo Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire seat. However, this heavy defeat provided new avenues for an electoral breakthrough. The election created a well-defined electoral battleground: the party ended up in second place (on the revised boundaries) in 98 seats – 85 of which were held by the Conservatives, confirming its greater success rate in the South of England. The challenge for the party then became to bring together two distinct electorates, with different socio-demographic and geographic characteristics.9 One, which has emerged in the wake of the Brexit debacle, has been described as the ‘Blue wall’, in an echo to Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ in the North of England. It includes on the one hand seats that had never been won by the Lib Dems, who traditionally voted Conservatives but had voted Remain and comprise a large proportion of degree holders; on the other hand, a ‘southern crescent’ or ‘yellow hallow’10 of commuter-belt, Home Counties seats being demographically, attitudinally and politically reshaped by the arrival of young professionals and ‘creatives’ leaving the unaffordable housing market in London or Brighton.11 The other includes the ‘battleground seats’ won by the party in 1997 but lost during and after the coalition: these are mostly located in the South-West of England and are places where the party benefits from electoral credibility due to having won in the past, but which are also more Leave-leaning.
- 12 Peter Sloman, “Ed Davey’s Tory Removals: The Liberal Democrats and the 2024 General Election”, The (...)
- 13 Jim Williams and Mark Pack, What Next For the Liberal Democrats?, 2024, p. 10.
10From an organisational perspective, the party ran a highly disciplined campaign in 2024. While the air war especially appeared “light-hearted in tone”, it was “ruthlessly disciplined in positioning the party as an anti-Tory instrument”.12 Having learned the 2019 lesson that it had fought as though PR was already in place13, the party first chose to focus its efforts on winning seats rather than maximising its national vote share. It thus deliberately took into account the fact that under FPTP, winning votes across the country is not enough: these votes have to be concentrated in the right places. Its list of target seats was limited and carefully chosen. The party thus focused on a) seats where it was second against the Conservatives and credible enough to present itself as the main challenger and b) seats where it had recently significantly increased its number of councillors or taken control of the council. These two categories often overlapped, the party having tried and succeeded in taking a lot of council seats from the Conservatives in likely Parliamentary target seats during the last Parliament.
- 14 Clémence Leveque, Coopération et subversion dans les assemblages de campagne : le cas de la campagn (...)
- 15 David Cutts, “Local Elections as a ‘Stepping Stone’: Does Winning Council Seats Boost the Liberal D (...)
- 16 Stephen Fisher, “Prospects for tactical voting at the 2024 general election”, UK in a Changing Euro (...)
11Indeed, the party’s gradual renaissance during the 2019-2024 Parliament was built on (re-)establishing a local presence and integrating electoral cycles, with local and devolved elections being seen as “staging posts” of future progress: for instance, the largely unwinnable 2021 Greater London Authority (GLA) election was considered as a way to start campaigning early and to build credibility in target wards for the 2022 borough elections.14 This strategy is clearly reminiscent of the party’s long-term strategy of using local and by-elections as a “stepping stone” for success at Westminster.15 This was made possible by a series of strong local election performances and by-election victories between June 2021 and July 2023 in Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, Tiverton and Honiton – both of which had voted Leave in 2016 – and Somerton and Frome. These successes started the series of stunts, as Ed Davey was seen smashing a wall made of blue cardboard boxes with an orange hammer, to symbolise the party’s progress in the soon to be coined “Blue Wall” after the Chesham and Amersham victory in June 2021. More broadly, by-elections were used to establish the party’s national credibility, train staff, mobilise key donors and monitor the Tory vote. The Somerton and Frome victory led the party to extend its list of target seats from about thirty to about sixty and to create a strategy for “fair political weather” in which the Conservative vote would continue to dwindle. In May 2024, the party demonstrated the efficiency of its targeting strategy, electing more local councillors than the Conservatives on a lower share of the vote. These strengthened its national credibility while demonstrating the sheer force of its campaign machine and Labour voters’ willingness to vote tactically to oust the Conservatives (and vice versa).16
12The party also made sure to establish a long-term presence and to start campaigning long before the general election was called. It selected and installed “local champions” in advance, grew its field staff team, sent key campaign staff to target seats tasked with building volunteer teams and to reach several Key Performance Indicators to be reviewed six-monthly (mostly to do with the volume of literature, the number of conversations with voters, fundraising and the size of the activist team). These teams were asked to leaflet the seats very regularly. Thus, 8 million leaflets had been delivered in the target seats between January 1st and March 1st 2024, a number which rose to 11 million by the end of May. On the day the election was called, Ed Davey travelled to Surrey, in a key Blue Wall target seat while two million “Flying Start” leaflets, printed in March, were ready to be delivered, and bulk-buy literature templates were ready for the whole election.
13The central party (HQ and the leadership) played an instrumental role in coordinating the campaign. During his leader’s speech at Autumn conference, Ed Davey claimed: “In my 35 years as a Liberal Democrat member, I’ve never seen our party, all of us, work so well together, with such discipline, such focus, such unity of purpose”.17 The results are indeed testament to the centralised, top-down running of the campaign, and to the cooperation between the central party and the target seats. Two examples are noteworthy. First, for the duration of the official campaign, the campaign chair and the party president held video calls each evening with top canvassers to better understand whether the message (and what part of it) was cutting through, what voters cared about, and what needed improving or changing. Second, most of the literature delivered in the target seats was designed and procured by Lib Dem HQ, allowing economies of scale, ensuring consistency in the message and between the ground and air campaign (legacy and digital media), and making sure quality was not dependent on local parties’ varying artworking or digital skills.
- 18 Siim Trumm and Caitlin Milazzo, “Local Campaign Messaging at the 2024 General Election”, UK Electio (...)
14This also allowed the campaign to be highly targeted and localised: more than 1,000 different versions of literature were delivered, with artwork and messages tailored to each seat. This amounted to 18 million items, each target voter receiving between 15 and 25 individual items from the Liberal Democrats. The party also made sure to be consistent and to build on data-driven campaigning (polling, focus groups, conversations with canvassers) with four pledges featuring in 94% of the literature as well as broadcast and interviews. These included issues that voters, rather than activists, cared about, such as the NHS and care (mentioned in 88% of leaflets), protecting the environment (78%) and helping people with the cost of living (76%).18
- 19 Peter Sloman, “Ed Davey’s Tory Removals”, op. cit., p. 86.
15Peter Sloman described Ed Davey’s policy announcements as leader as “reactive and short-termist, reflecting the context of the pandemic and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis”, and as primarily driven by the need to maximise the party’s electoral impact, rather than by any visible philosophical coherence, nevertheless putting emphasis on ‘tax and spend’ policies.19
- 20 Mark Pack, “Journey to Victory: The Story behind 72 Lib Dem MPs (LDN #186)”. 26 July 2024, https:// (...)
Figure 1. Relative weight of content on leaflets by party20
- 21 See William Atkinson, “Ed Davey Is Worse than a Clown: He’s a Fool”, The Telegraph, 28 May 2024, ht (...)
- 22 Peter Sloman, “Ed Davey’s Tory Removals”, op. cit., p. 88.
- 23 Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne Stewart and Paul Whiteley (éds.), Political choice in Bri (...)
16While ridiculed, compared to Boris Johnson’s gaffes, or accused of trivialising a serious political moment21, Ed Davey’s stunt campaign, as well as his more serious and emotional Party Election Broadcast on being a carer were instrumental in giving the party an amount of coverage that it had failed to generate previously, and despite all appearances of exuberance, allowed it to put forward serious policies. For the first time since 2010, local teams could fight a “ground war” without being burdened by an unpopular leader or nationally generated controversies.22 Breaking away from less media-friendly past leaders, his performance certainly gives credence to the fact that ‘personality politics’ do play a role in modern political campaigns. This is especially true for third parties whose identity is unclear to most voters: the leader – and his projected personality traits – may then act as a heuristic shortcut in voters’ decision-making.23
- 24 Rob Wilson, 5 Days to Power: The Journey to Coalition Britain (London: Biteback, 2010), p. 30.
- 25 Clémence Leveque, Coopération et subversion dans les assemblages de campagne, op. cit., p. 600.
- 26 Paul Webb, Stavroula Chrona and Tim Bale, “UK election: Reform and Green members campaigned more on (...)
- 27 Analysis of 1200 election leaflets in 295 constituencies reveals that 80% of the party’s literature (...)
17Message consistency across England broke from the party’s tradition of presenting various messages to different constituencies.24 Coupled with literature, the door-knocking operation helped demonstrate to voters the Lib Dems’ credibility in each seat, giving credit to a performative strategy which presents the effort as the message.25 Further proof of the campaign’s momentum can be found in Queen Mary University’s Party Members Project26: compared to 2019, fewer members reported having carried out no activity in 2024 (36% against 43%). Despite lower levels of online activity – which is consistent with HQ’s role – more members declared having displayed a poster (31% against 51%) or carried out leafleting (33% against 59%). More members also engaged in ‘high intensity’ activities, such as canvassing (17% against 31%). Finally, the party resorted to tactical voting messages repeatedly. The Lib Dems have always been the party to make the most references to strategic voting and, being a centrist party, to benefit from it. This pattern reached new highs in 2024 with between 70 and 80% of the party’s literature referencing tactical voting, against 40% in 2019.27
- 28 Tom Calver, “How Tactical Voting Threatens the Tories in the General Election”, The Times, 4 July 2 (...)
Figure 2. Proportion of leaflets mentioning tactical voting by party (2010-2024)28
- 29 John Curtice, “The 2024 General Election”, Keynote Speech, PSA Conference, Glasgow, 26 March 2024.
- 30 “How do Britons feel about Brexit five years on?”, YouGov, 29 January 2025, https://yougov.co.uk/po (...)
- 31 Liberal Democrats, For a Fair Deal, General Election Manifesto, 2024.
18UK-EU relations were seldom mentioned. Since 2019, the Liberal Democrats – like Labour – have adopted a position that John Curtice describes as ‘loser’s consent’29, interpreting their 2019 results as evidence that the Brexit debate was over and that their support for Remain, Revoke, or a second referendum had cost them votes. For the Liberal Democrats, this was particularly the case in their historical South-West strongholds (historically affected by the Common Agricultural or Fisheries policies), where they were trying to appeal to Leave-voting, Conservative waverers. This echoes some of the party’s MPs’ careful management of the European issue throughout history: in 1992, Nick Harvey, the MP for Devon North, was the only Lib Dem MP to oppose the ratification of the Maastricht treaty. Despite opposing the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) and even though national support for rejoining the EU has grown (to 55% in January 2025)30, the Liberal Democrats have sought to downplay their rhetoric on Brexit, no longer presenting themselves as a pro-rejoin party. This led them to lose a large part of their membership, which fell from 126,000 in December 2019 to less than 74,000 in December 2021. In 2024, Brexit was not explicitly mentioned until page 112 of the party’s manifesto which only focused on specific aspects of the UK-EU relationship, such as the economic benefits of rebuilding closer ties by rejoining the Single Market or restoring a Youth Mobility Scheme.31
19With 72 seats, most of which in the leafy South of England, the Lib Dems have won ten more seats than their previous best result in 2005. It is also their best result in over a century and the Liberal party’s 158 seats in 1923. The party won 12.2% of the vote, and 11% of the seats. A somewhat out of trend pattern and sign of success is that it also kept all its held seats and by-election wins. Its performance undoubtedly reinforced the scale of the Conservative defeat: out of 63 gains, 59 have been taken off the Tories, including some which had been Conservative for nearly or over 100 years (Turnbridge Wells since 1931, Horsham since 1885), and 4 from the SNP. The party’s vote was thus very efficient, i.e. concentrated in areas where it mattered and not ‘wasted’ in areas where it did not: 46% of the party’s vote came from the 72 seats it won.
- 32 Richard Kelly, Short Money, Research briefing SN01663, House of Commons Library, 31 January 2025, h (...)
- 33 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats, op. cit., p. 7.
20Regaining its status as the third-largest parliamentary force provides the Liberal Democrats with more than two million pounds annually in Short Money32, as well as many more Parliamentary Staff. These will likely be used, amongst other things, to further the professionalisation of the party, improve the staffing structure across the country and restore its previously dwindling “campaign advantage”33 in places where it matters: this will be all the more important since many key campaign staff have now moved on to parliamentary staff positions and will need to be replaced. Despite Labour’s overwhelming majority, the Liberal Democrats also regain a more prominent institutional role in Parliament. While previously, Ed Davey was not guaranteed to ask one question a month, the party now has guaranteed time in Parliamentary debates and an automatic entitlement to ask two questions during Prime Minister's Question Time each week. The party now also chairs three House of Commons committees: Health and Social Care, Environment, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs, and Petitions. The first two are in line with the party’s campaign pledges and will likely help it put forward its liberal vision for the UK post-Brexit, and hold the government to account on key priorities.
- 34 Sean O’Grady, “Ed Davey inherits a party optimistic about its future – history proves the Lib Dems (...)
21This undeniable electoral feat, after years in the doldrums, demonstrates the threat of the “Yellow peril” and the party’s ability to survive and rebuild against some of the worst odds: a stable quality of the party, which has elsewhere been compared to Japanese knotweed.34 It is however my contention that the party’s unprecedented 2024 general election performance is more lukewarm than it appears. In the rest of this article, I focus on several weaknesses, challenges and dilemmas hidden by the result, that point to both long-lasting, and new, difficulties.
22First and foremost, as in many previous elections, the party benefited from circumstances beyond its control, notably the (un)popularity of the two main party leaders and their failures: the Lib Dems are thus still not masters of their own fate. As such, the result does not reflect a vote of endorsement for the party’s vision. This is reflected in the party’s vote share, which barely increased, by 0.7 percentage points, to 12.2%. If this is the party’s highest vote share since the coalition, it remains lower than at any point between 1974 and 2010 and falls short of the 20% core vote goal announced in 2015.35 The Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly benefited from tactical voting, without which they would not have won so many seats in southern England. While they have historically been the main beneficiaries of tactical voting and a receptacle for protest votes, this pattern also reached new highs in 2024. Sir Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader in 2020 and his subsequent policy shifts, in an attempt to detoxify the party’s image and move away from the Corbyn legacy, made floating voters in the seats the Lib Dems were challenging less concerned by the prospect of a Labour government and allowed the party to benefit from the defection of disillusioned Conservative voters. This was first compounded by the division of the right-wing vote by the Reform Party, who won 14.3% of the national vote: for instance, the Liberal Democrats took Eastleigh from the Conservatives with a 1,500-vote majority while Reform polled 6,000 votes. Second, Labour supporters who viewed the Liberal Democrats as the most credible challengers to the Conservatives in their constituencies – seemingly forgiving the party for its coalition years – voted tactically. This process was facilitated by the ideological and demographic proximity between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters.36 It was even reported that some Labour activists had travelled to Lib Dem target seats to campaign, and vice versa.37
- 38 John Curtice, “The 2024 Election: Sir Ed Davey’s Gamble Pays Of”, Journal of Liberal History 124, A (...)
23Analysis by John Curtice38 reveals that, in recent local elections, the party had made most progress in Conservative wards: for instance, in 2023, its national vote share went up 1 percentage point, against 5 in Conservative-facing wards. This pattern was confirmed in the general election. The party gained 9 percentage points in constituencies where it was the runner-up against the Conservatives, where 44% of 2019 Labour voters switched to them. Elsewhere, where it lacked credibility to win, was not the main challenger, or conducted minimal campaign activity, it lost votes. In Conservative-Labour marginals, many Lib Dem voters switched to Labour to kick out the Tories, showing the reciprocal nature of tactical voting between the two parties. As such, the Lib Dems remain highly dependent on voters lending them their vote, and on the fortunes of the big two parties, particularly the one in power. A parallel can be drawn with 1997, when the Liberal Democrats similarly won seats from an unpopular Conservative government with the help of tactical Labour voters.
- 39 Richard Cracknell and Carl Baker, General election 2024: Results and analysis, Research Briefing CB (...)
- 40 London Liberal Democrats, Business Motion, 7.1: Indemnifying London Local Parties for Lost Deposits (...)
24The strict targeting conducted by the party also presents several drawbacks. First, unwinnable seats were left to their own devices and barely any campaigning happened there during the campaign. The very small increase in vote share, given that the seats the party won were won with large vote shares and an average increase of 14.1 percentage points, means the party’s vote share fell elsewhere. The party lost 229 deposits (36%), the equivalent of £114,500.39 This was an increase from 136 (22%) in 2019 but lower than 275 in 2017, the largest number of lost deposits the party had ever suffered. The prioritisation of target seats at the expense of the rest of the constituencies has long created tensions inside the party. Ahead of the general election, in late 2023, ten London local parties had submitted a motion at the regional conference requesting reimbursement of lost electoral deposits by the regional party.40 These branches argued that such a measure would help them continue building their presence – particularly in local elections – without suffering from a financial gap after prioritising support for target constituencies, and lessen the long-term detrimental effects of targeting. While the party leadership has acknowledged the sacrifice of paper candidates, since the election, calls not to forget “black hole” seats have been heard again on the party’s informal networks.
- 41 While not unprecedented, it is more difficult for the party to win seats by starting in third place (...)
25More broadly, the party might have hit a ceiling in the number of constituencies it can realistically hope to win in future as its success in one part of the country might sow the seeds of its failure elsewhere and highlights future challenges. The party is now the runner-up in only 27 constituencies, compared to 40 for the Greens and 98 for Reform. The party ranks third in a further 43 seats, 16 of which within 5,000 votes of coming first, 12 of which held by the Conservatives. This appears particularly worrying as most seats won in 2024 were won having started in second place in 2019.41 The party now finds itself in uncharted territory and faces a new challenge: that of having many seats, but few second places.
- 42 Patrick Dunleavy, “Labour’s ‘Loveless Landslide’ Is Stronger than It Looks”, LSE British Politics a (...)
26This fragile strength is also made worse by the party’s slim majorities in a number of seats. Analysis by Patrick Dunleavy42 reveals that a quarter of the Lib Dem cohort were elected on more than 50% of the vote, half with between 40 and 50% of the vote, and another quarter with less than 40% of the vote in their constituency. While 25 Lib Dem MPs have a majority of more than 10,000 votes, against just five Conservative MPs, the party has a majority of less than 5,000 votes in 21 seats, while 10 seats are held with less than a 5% majority. The Conservatives are placed second in 64 Lib Dem seats, within 5 percentage points in 20 constituencies and within 10 in 44.
- 43 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats, op. cit., chapter 5.
27This problem is compounded by another the party has long suffered from: that of benefiting from mostly tactical votes, which tend to be “soft” and lent. Indeed, 2024 Lib Dem voters have weak ties with the party: among those who had previously voted Conservative and lent the party their vote, just 9% said they could not see themselves voting for the Tories again in future. This makes the party vulnerable to a Conservative resurgence, particularly as it is unlikely, even with as controversial a leader as Kemi Badenoch, that the Conservatives will be as unpopular next time around. Despite the Tories’ current rightward drift and focus on fighting Reform, this risk is heightened by research from David Cutts et al., which demonstrates that the Liberal Democrat campaign machine is significantly weaker in defensive scenarios than in offensive ones.43 Many Conservative voters might thus return to the fold as the tide of anti-Tory tactical voting recedes and the Tories’ tradition of pragmatism might help them reinvent themselves ideologically and rebuild their organisational competence. To thwart it, the Lib Dems will need to cement their presence in newly-won seats, with MPs acting as “local champions” for their community, following in the footsteps of Helen Morgan MP, who was elected in the North Shropshire by-election in 2021 and increased her majority in 2024 from 47.2 to 52.9%. Additionally, while the party failed to grow its membership during the campaign, it will need to do so in order to improve its grassroots campaigning capacity.
- 44 John Curtice, “The 2024 Election: Sir Ed Davey’s Gamble Pays Off”, op. cit.
- 45 Robert Ford, “Labour’s Poll Lead Is Fading and the Base Is Weak – It’s Time for Starmer to Roll the (...)
28Third and perhaps more worryingly, the Liberal Democrats find themselves in an unfavourable position against the incumbent and will need to resolve and clarify their relationship with Labour. Its focus on the Blue Wall has led it to broadly neglect Labour-facing territory and made it uncompetitive. The party won no seats off Labour. In the ten seats where it was second to Labour after 2019, it lost 8.3 percentage points, while the Greens gained nearly 10. In constituencies where it placed third, the party lost 0.6 percentage points.44 The Lib Dems are now second in six Labour-held seats, within 10,000 votes of winning in only nine, and trailing by less than 20 percentage points in just two (Burnley and Sheffield Hallam). By comparison, the Greens are second to Labour in 40 constituencies and trailing by less than 20 points in three. 82% of the party’s MPs now represent constituencies in either Greater London, the South-West, South East or East of England, while just 4 were elected in the North. The Lib Dems thus seem ill-positioned to capitalise on the likely future unpopularity of the governing party, for whom, unlike Tony Blair in 1997, the honeymoon period appears already over following the winter fuel payment, two-child benefit and freebies scandal debacle. Labour was elected by a very narrow coalition of voters and have (in January 2025) already suffered a seven-point decline in opinion polls, while Starmer’s approval ratings are similarly plummeting.45
- 46 “Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey delivers speech”, Sky News, 2024.
- 47 Peter Walker, “Ed Davey: we can offer better opposition than ‘Punch and Judy’ Tories”, The Guardian(...)
29The party, which labelled itself the “Tory removal service” during the campaign, remains committed to “finishing the job” of “confining the Conservatives to the history books”.46 It is nevertheless more difficult to make gains from another opposition party than from an unpopular government, although the party continued to make gains from the Conservatives in the 2001 election, notably by building on the popularity of its elected MPs. The party’s strategy of constructive opposition to the Labour party, visible in the tone of the leaders’ dialogue in PMQs, with Ed Davey wanting to avoid what he calls ‘Punch and Judy politics’47 might make it difficult for voters to differentiate between Lib and Lab, with the party not being distinctive enough from the incumbent.
30Nevertheless, the party has recently (January 2025) launched a “Labour-facing campaigners’ network”, which proves its commitment to taking votes and seats from Labour. One overlooked aspect that appears particularly important to fighting Labour effectively is candidate selection. While the party has done well on increasing its share of female representatives in recent general elections, it does less well on minority-ethnic descriptive representation. Without any minority ethnic MP between 1910 and 2004, the party elected one in 2017, two in 2019, and five in 2024, a very undermining progress given its increase from 15 to 72 MPs and the recommendations of the 2016 Alderdice and 2019 Thornhill reviews. In the big cities, like London, Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle, where the party has announced that it wants to make progress, and where large parts of the population don’t identify as White British, it is imperative the Liberal Democrats field ethnically diverse candidates if they want to reap the rewards of Labour’s unpopularity. In 2024, the party won no seat in the big cities outside London.
- 48 The 2025 Spring conference passed motion F10 which plans to make it easier for local parties to sel (...)
31Having reached a potential ceiling and being in an unfavourable position against Labour, the party needs, fourth, to keep laying the groundwork in seats where it has come third or lower so as to achieve second places, and then wins, in the next few Parliaments, and keep out the Green and Reform threat. This was a secondary objective of the 2024 general election campaign, with non-target seats being asked to focus on capacity-building, notably recruiting activists or sending one election address to voters who had not heard of the party in years in order to maintain a minimal presence. In future, the central party will need to make life easier for local parties, by allowing economies of scale, or by coordinating training activities, something it has already started doing for several years. It will also involve selecting candidates early even though the tradition is for unwinnable seats to be selected fairly late.48 It will finally rely on focusing on local and devolved elections in those places, in order to bridge the credibility gap the party still suffers from in many places.
- 49 “What next for the Liberal Democrats?”, More in Common, https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/latest-insi (...)
- 50 “As Liberal Democrats, We Must Set out a Bold and Distinctive Offer to Voters”, Letters, The Guardi (...)
- 51 Peter Sloman, “Ed Davey’s Tory Removals”, op. cit., p. 87.
32Fifth and finally, the party suffers from an identity problem. While this is not new, the party having always suffered from an unclear identity in voters’ minds and struggled to keep its voters from one election to the next, this challenge expresses itself in new ways post-2024. The party needs to hold a very diverse coalition of voters together. Most of them have, very traditionally, weak ties to the party: research from More in Common shows that 26% voted tactically and only 57% would have voted Liberal Democrat if any party could have won in their seat.49 Moreover, while voters in the Blue Wall overwhelmingly voted Remain in 2016, 27% of the party’s 2024 voters voted Leave, particularly in the South-West, a traditionally Eurosceptic part of England with a nevertheless traditional Liberal (Democrat) vote. As such, Brexit and UK-EU relationships are one policy area that the Lib Dems will need to resolve tensions around. While the membership has called for the party to put forward a more positive stance on Europe – notably by adopting a motion at Spring conference in 2022 – Davey’s ‘ideological quietism’ on the issue led to thirty senior figures writing an open letter to the Guardian in November 202350, which led Davey to sack one of the signatories, Sarah Ludford, as Europe spokesperson in the Lords51. Nevertheless, the leadership should still be wary of antagonising part of its voter coalition: if a more vocal position on the EU would be welcomed by some voters, it would be received negatively by 24% of the party’s voters who voted Leave in 2016.
- 52 For further analysis, see Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, Footsoldiers: Political Party Mem (...)
- 53 Peter Walker, “Lib Dems Members Rebuff Leadership with Vote to Keep Housebuilding Targets”, The Gua (...)
33What’s more, under Ed Davey’s leadership – an Orange-booker and coalition minister – the party has increasingly become a party of the centre-left with a centre-right electorate. Indeed, most members see themselves as being located somewhere between the centre and the left of Labour52 and, bruised by the mistakes and betrayal of the coalition, would like their party leadership and MPs to hold Labour to account on its fiscal discipline agenda. This tension has been particularly visible in recent debates over policy choices. At Autumn conference in 2023, the motion proposed by the leadership to abolish national housing construction targets in an effort to attract conservative voters in Blue Wall seats was rejected by the membership, who supported an amendment from the Young Liberals calling for the retention of the target of building 380,000 new homes per year.53 In the 2024 general election, the party mostly put forward centre-left policies localised to centre-right, older voters in rural Conservative seats: these included prioritising social care and carers and introducing a sewage tax as well as more controversial policies such as introducing a windfall tax, raising the tax threshold, taxing big banks, capital gains, digital services and the biggest flyers, etc. The party has since voted against the government on the winter fuel payment and the two-child benefit cap.
34The party has long rejected taking part in the left-right debate, claiming that they are neither left nor right, but ‘forward’, progressive and radical. It nevertheless faces a key dilemma as it both wants to press Labour from the left, while aspiring to take more seats from the Tories. The party now represents 5 of the 10 wealthiest constituencies in England and has largely become a middle-class party in suburban, more affluent areas of southern England. Although the Liberal Democrats traditionally cater their messages to different constituencies, left and centre-left policies evoked above are likely to make MPs in those seats uncomfortable with the national message. If the Conservatives do become less unpopular, or the desire to keep them out of power becomes less compelling, then the Liberal Democrats may not be able to rely on Labour voters backing them in their newly-won seats – particularly if the party decides to attack Labour on its record – while Conservative voters might return to the fold if the party antagonises them too much. Having moved to the left because of the scarring and traumatising coalition experience, which was made possible by the party’s shift to the right on the economy, and due to the Tories’ toxic image ever since, the party could nevertheless do well to try and occupy the vacant space left on the centre-right by Kemi Badenoch’s rightward drift. This positioning conundrum might reinforce one of the party’s long-standing plights, with the voters not knowing what it stands for. In future, the party will thus need to articulate and set out a positive and distinctive vision beyond being a receptacle for anti-Tory protest votes. This is particularly relevant to the party’s last but not least difficulty, its long-term commitment to PR.
- 54 For a synthesis, see Vernon Bogdanor, The Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats (Gresham College, (...)
35Indeed, a key historical element of the Lib Dems’ identity has also been questioned by the results and might come to threaten the party’s long-term progress: its quest for electoral reform and the introduction of PR at Westminster. While Liberal Prime Ministers at the turn of the 20th century opposed it for party interest, the party first became committed to introducing PR (specifically, today, the Single Transferable Vote) at the national level in 1922, when the Asquithian Liberals were kicked out of power. One of the party’s long-standing demands on constitutional reform, PR has often been a negotiation tool in Hung Parliaments, supply and confidence agreements or coalitions but has repeatedly failed to be implemented, most notably during the 2011 referendum on AV+.54
36In two-party systems, FPTP traditionally makes converting votes into seats particularly challenging for third parties with geographically dispersed support like the Liberal Democrats. In 1983, the Liberal-SDP Alliance thus garnered 25.4% of the votes but only returned 23 MPs, while Labour, with a 2.2% higher vote share returned 209. In 2019 again, the party garnered 11.6% of the national vote, but only won 1.7% of seats.
37The 2024 result stands in stark contrast with these past examples and demonstrates the party’s ability to circumvent and even capitalise on the effects of FPTP [Fig 4]. Indeed, the party advanced from 11 MPs in 2019 (plus four by-election wins) to 72 in 2024 (+380%), despite only a 0.7% increase in vote share. While it had taken 334,122 votes to elect each Lib Dem MP in 2019, just 49,000 were needed this time around. Unlike previous elections marked by severe disproportionality between votes and seats, the party achieved 12.2% of the vote and 11% of the seats, a quasi-proportional result which is testament to its strategy of focusing on seats rather than votes.
- 55 Mark Pack, “Journey to Victory: The Story behind 72 Lib Dem MPs (LDN #186)”.
Figure 4. Seats to vote ratio of the Liberal Democrats and ancestors (1970-2024)55
38Moreover, the party’s conundrum is compounded by its poor performance in devolved elections which use partly proportional voting systems. The party has returned 1 Member of the Senedd, 4 Members of the Scottish Parliament and 2 London Assembly Members in 2021, with declining results in all of them since the coalition.
- 56 Clémence Leveque, Coopération et subversion dans les assemblages de campagne, op. cit., pp. 603-604
39The GLA election is, in this regard, the exception that proves the rule.56 Beyond the Mayor of London, voters are also asked to elect 25 assembly members with the Additional Member System: 14 are elected in single-member constituencies with FPTP while 11 are elected off London-wide closed party lists, with PR designed to compensate for the disproportionality of FPTP. In 2018, the Conservative Party had lost control of the Richmond and Kingston councils to the Liberal Democrats but managed to elect their constituency candidate to the GLA in 2021 while their mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey, had finished first. Since then, echoing their national unpopularity, the Conservatives have continued to decline. In 2022, they secured only eight councillors in Kingston and one in Richmond, which they subsequently lost in a January 2024 by-election to the Liberal Democrats, mirroring national trends.
40In 2024, voters chose Labour’s Sadiq Khan for mayor while electing Liberal Democrat Gareth Roberts as the South-West constituency representative, showing their savvy use of the different voting systems at their disposal. This is the first GLA constituency to be won by a party other than Labour or the Conservatives since the election was introduced in 2000. Roberts benefited from his credibility as council leader, that of the party in wider South-West London, and the cumulative effects of the previous campaign(s). This victory represents a significant success for the party, underlining the importance of sustained campaigning, targeted efforts, integration across electoral timelines, patterns that have proved instrumental in the party’s general election success.
41However, the GLA results also reveal underlying difficulties. Even in a constituency encompassing the equivalent of five parliamentary seats, the party managed to bypass the effects of FPTP and persuade Labour voters to tactically oppose the unpopular Conservatives. Winning the seat nonetheless prevented the party from electing its second list candidate, Rob Blackie. Paradoxically then, the party’s success in the constituency under FPTP damaged its PR performance, where it garnered only 8.7% of the vote – more than 2 percentage points lower than its London-wide vote share in the subsequent general election. In the mayoral race, the change from the Supplementary Vote (SV) system to FPTP barely allowed the party to finish third with 5.8% of the vote – just 70 votes ahead of the Greens – marking the first time since 2008 it retained its electoral deposit. Lacking credibility to win outright or to encourage tactical voting on a regional scale, the party was traditionally squeezed between the two major parties.
- 57 Alys Thomas, “The Liberal Democrats: Losing to Win?”, Contemporary Wales 14:1, 2001, p. 123.
- 58 Peter Sloman, “Ed Davey’s Tory Removals”, op. cit., p. 83.
- 59 Thomas Quinn, “Third-Party Strategy under Plurality Rule: The British Liberal Democrats and the New (...)
- 60 Mark Pack, “The Liberal Democrat Approach to Campaigning”, Journal of Liberal History 83, Summer 20 (...)
42Thus, over a century of grappling with the adverse effects of FPTP, the Liberal Democrats have honed an effective strategy for securing seats and have become masters of the ‘dark arts’57 of targeting and encouraging tactical voting within FPTP, something they had already started to show in 1997 when they went up from 20 to 46 MPs with a smaller vote share (16.8% compared to 17.8% in 1992). According to Peter Sloman, the 2024 general election campaign “provides an object lesson in how a third party can flourish under the ‘first past the post’ electoral system”58 by “targeting districts of one-party dominance” and “primarily opposing one major party while taking a less oppositional but still arms-length approach towards the other”.59 This and the GLA example underscore the paradox of the Liberal Democrats’ inability to succeed in PR elections. In 2014, current party president and peer Mark Pack already wondered: “If the party [cannot] do well in elections of the very sort it want[s], freed from the shackles of FPTP, what long-term future for the party [is] there?”60
- 61 Clémence Leveque, Coopération et subversion dans les assemblages de campagne, op. cit., pp. 275-279
43The party tends to blame voters – who supposedly “don’t understand proportional representation” – for its lack of success in GLA elections or attributes it to the media focus on the mayoral race, which overshadows the proportional list vote in voters’ minds.61 However, the party’s limited resources, its inability to concentrate them in large constituencies, and its failure to encourage tactical voting under proportional systems appear more significant barriers. PR allows voters to choose their ‘true’ preferred party or candidate, necessitating positive reasons for support, which the Liberal Democrats, often reliant on protest voting and incumbent unpopularity, struggle to provide.
- 62 Liberal Democrats, F29: Fair Votes Now, Autumn Conference, Brighton, 2024.
- 63 Jim Williams and Mark Pack, What Next For the Liberal Democrats?, 2024, p. 19.
- 64 House of Commons, Elections (Proportional Representation), Division 52, Hansard, 3 December 2024, h (...)
- 65 David Cutts, Andrew Russell and Joshua Townsley, The Liberal Democrats, op. cit., p. 270 and follow (...)
44Despite the general election results, the party’s 2024 autumn conference endorsed a new motion on “fair votes”.62 The party has since welcomed the future change in the Welsh election voting system with the Senedd being entirely elected with PR starting in 2026.63 In December 2024, Sarah Olney, the MP for Richmond Park, introduced the 10-minute rule bill on introducing PR for Westminster elections on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for fair elections. For the first time, a bill endorsing PR was passed by two votes (138 to 136).64 Despite the Labour conference having passed a similar motion on PR in 2022, it seems unlikely that the Labour leadership will want to change the electoral system given its 2024 vote-to-seat ratio (34%-63%), something that Keir Starmer has broadly ruled out for his first term. While the Liberal Democrats are well-positioned to benefit from tactical voting under FPTP due to their centrist positioning, the party risks losing ground to other parties under proportional systems as voters may opt for smaller parties – particularly the Greens and Reform – something these two parties’ vote shares in the 2024 general election (6.7% and 14.3% respectively) have confirmed. By advocating PR, the Liberal Democrats might thus be the forerunners of political change without reaping the electoral benefits.65
45This overview of the party’s exceptional performance in the 2024 general election, and of the dilemmas it hides, reveals both long-lasting (stable) and new challenges that the party will need to tackle if it wants to hold on to its seats, make further progress, and continue to build across the country. First, its electoral credibility and political fortunes are tied explicitly to those of other parties, and to their mistakes: as such, the party does not control its own destiny. Second, it suffers from having a soft vote and from relying on tactical voting against the incumbent. During the 2024-2029 Parliament, it will thus need to articulate a more positive vision and solve an identity dilemma in order to entrench its presence in newly-held seats, keep its voter coalition and attract new ones from both left and right, expand further in Tory territory and make progress against Labour. While these are traditional difficulties for the Lib Dems, the 2024 result has also seen a broader surge of smaller parties and revealed the party’s new conundrum on PR, as the disproportional effects of FPTP played out in its favour like never before. Interestingly however, unlike the strategy to continue building on the 2024 momentum, the PR tension is something that the party’s recently released general election review, led by Tim Farron MP, does not address.
46The 2025 round of local elections was marked overwhelmingly by the continued surge of Reform UK, which now seems to be benefiting from FPTP, and the further fragmentation of the vote in England. Along with 370 councillors (a net gain of 163), the Liberal Democrats gained control of three councils and continued making inroads into Conservative territory. In Helen Morgan’s Shropshire, where the party went from holding 14 to 42 seats, an interesting pattern emerged, where parliamentary strength appears to also be helping the party at council level, the reverse of the way the Lib Dems have been making progress over the years. Yet the party’s projected national vote share, at 17%, confirms its relative failure to appeal to voters and its stable status as a vehicle for protest votes in second-order elections.