Jo Swinson has urged Liberal Democrat activists to make one final election push, which she said could deny Boris Johnson a majority, thwart Brexit and potentially remove some high-profile Conservative MPs.
Undertaking a tour of Lib Dem targets in London and surrounding commuter towns, Swinson told the Guardian that her election night would be greatly cheered if her party managed to depose Dominic Raab or other prominent Tory Brexiters.
“I think it’s fair to say that that’s the case,” she said. “I think there would be a lot of people who would be happy to stay up for such moments.”
Swinson began her mini-tour in Horsham, inside Raab’s Surrey constituency of Esher and Walton, a focus of considerable Lib Dem campaigning, before meeting party activists in Guildford and Wimbledon.
The Lib Dems were a distant second or third in all three seats in the 2017 election, but have based a strategy around trying to tempt soft Labour supporters into voting tactically as a way of removing the incumbent Conservative.
Under the first-past-the-post voting system, tactical voting is when you vote for a party that you would not normally support in order to stop another party from winning. For example, in a constituency where the result is usually tight between a party you dislike and a party you somewhat dislike, and the party you support usually comes a distant third and has no chance of winning, you might choose to lend your vote to the party you somewhat dislike. This avoids ‘“wasting” your vote on a party that cannot win the seat, and boosting the chances that the party you dislike most will lose.
The Lib Dem national poll ratings have slipped over the course of the campaign, with bullish party predictions gradually scaled back towards an appeal for mass tactical voting to deny Johnson a majority.
Swinson herself has faced pressure over both the poll slide and for strategic decisions, such as initially presenting herself as a possible prime minister, and the Lib Dems’ pledge to revoke Brexit without another referendum if they won a Commons majority.
Swinson declined to say whether increasing the party’s 2017 total of 12 seats – YouGov’s latest prediction, released late on Tuesday, had them winning 15 – would count as success, given regular predictions of 80 or more MPs at the party’s autumn conference.
“I want to stop Brexit,” she said. “To do that we need to stop Boris Johnson getting a majority, and that’s what I’m absolutely focused on doing in these final hours.
“It does look like there’s so many seats that are still very marginal, could be won and lost by very small majorities, and so there’s a huge amount to play for.”
Pointing to strong local election results and record party membership, Swinson argued that activists’ efforts to get the Lib Dem vote out could help the party defy modest public expectations.
This was the focus of Swinson’s campaign stops on Wednesday, during which she addressed the party faithful in a car park, a village hall and finally an LGBT venue in Wimbledon, with none of the events open to the wider public.
“I know it has been a tough campaign, when you have the rain and the wind and the cold,” she told the Wimbledon rally. “What we have to do is to stop Boris Johnson getting his majority. That is in sight, we can do this.”
In all three speeches she stressed the likely closeness of many constituency results, pointing to 2017 when the Lib Dems lost out in Richmond Park and in North East Fife by 45 votes and two votes respectively.
