ELECTIONS IN BRITAIN….The British are having another election tomorrow. Yawn. Tony Blair will win again and there will likely be no fights over dimpled chads or electronic voting. That sounds a bit tedious, doesn’t it?
But why will Blair win? Conventional wisdom says it’s because the Conservatives are hopelessly incoherent and the Liberal Democrats are just plain hopeless.
Maybe so. But take a look at the chart on the right that I’ve stolen from last week’s Economist. It’s about as perfect a real-world example as you could find of that hoary old Poli Sci 101 standby, Down’s Median Voter Theorem. Tony Blair has positioned himself so perfectly as the median candidate ? neither too liberal nor too conservative ? that there’s literally no room for another candidate to squeeze in between him and the absolute center of British politics. It’s a masterful performance.
Of course, there’s also the odd result that apparently British voters, on average, think of themselves as slightly too far to the left. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? I wonder what a similar poll would find in America?
