The Washington Post continues to argue that its preferred party would win if the game was checkers and not chess.
On Friday, the outlet published “analysis” with the headline: “If Britain had Germany’s electoral system, Boris Johnson may have lost the election.”
“Europe’s startled take on the British elections may — at least partially — also be based on one fundamental difference between Britain and continental Europe. Whereas Prime Minister Boris Johnson celebrated a historic win on Friday, the same results may very well have made him a loser if, for instance, the election had taken place in Germany,” the Post reported.
Sure, and if America’s election system was designed around the popular vote, Donald Trump may have lost the 2016 election.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that, aside from being meaningless, a different election system may very well have the same results because, naturally, candidates run an election based around a country’s election system. So, saying Trump would have lost if the popular vote determined the 2016 election doesn’t mean anything, because if that were the case Trump would have campaigned differently and may have ended up winning the popular vote. Instead, he campaigned under America’s current election system, while Hillary Clinton did not.
The same goes for the U.K. If it had Germany’s electoral system, Boris Johnson and his party would have campaigned differently, and may ultimately have won the election anyway.
The Post went on to bemoan Britain’s election system, because it is not a proportional representation system like that of Germany or New Zealand:
In a proportional representation system — in place in countries such as Germany and New Zealand — the results would have looked very different. There, the share of total votes a party receives largely determines the number of seats in parliament. The Conservative Party would still have won the most votes, with a share of 43.6 percent. But without a majority, Labour (32.2 percent) may have been able to form a Brexit-skeptical coalition with the Scottish National Party (3.9 percent), the Liberal Democrats (11.5 percent) and other parties, under the assumption of full proportionality with no minimum vote share threshold required for entry to Parliament.
In other words,” the Post continued, “while Johnson delivered his victory speech in front of a slogan claiming that he would lead ‘the people’s government,’ his administration does not actually represent the majority of voters.”
President Bill Clinton also didn’t receive a majority of the popular vote, but the Post would never make such a claim about him.
This whole thing where the media imagines what it would be like if an election took place under different circumstances without acknowledging that the different circumstances would lead to different styles of campaigning has become common after Trump won in 2016. The saddest part of the Post’s article is the fact that it is essentially praising Germany’s election system over Britain’s, and in doing so it is bemoaning Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’s loss.
Let’s not forget the ongoing and numerous allegations of anti-Semitism from Corbyn. If Britain had Germany’s election system, an anti-Semite may have won. That’s not exactly a pro-Germany stance.