What we learned from the Campbell v Kelly tactical voting debate (and it's quite a lot)

When Stuart Campbell theatrically unblocked me on Twitter at lunchtime and demanded that I do the same and engage him in public debate about "tactical voting on the list" (an issue he used to be in total agreement with me about until changing his mind at some point after May 2016), there may have been some people who were innocently asking themselves the question "do you think Stew genuinely wants to debate in good faith, or does he just want another platform to call James the C-word and all the synonyms of 'lunatic' he can think of?"  In which case all I can ask is whether you even know the guy.  I did go through the motions of asking him some searching questions at the outset of the debate, but the futility of the exercise was quickly brought home when he ignored all of my first five or six questions and carried on replying to his own tweets instead in a seemingly neverending monologue.  After ignoring the fifth or sixth question, he said "I've been doing all of the talking so far, so I shall pause now and let you answer the following question", and the comic timing was just too exquisite, I properly cracked up and couldn't stop laughing.  And of course the insanely abusive insults followed on not too long later - it was the quintessential Stew Experience that we've all learned to "adjust" to as the years have gone by and he's become ever more militant, extreme, and angry at the world.

The logic underpinning his destructive tactics is of course to make any sort of real debate totally impossible in order to ensure that the proceedings are more predictable and to make the outcome more likely to be a noisy stalemate rather than a clear defeat.  Engaging in good faith is a risky affair, and that's a risk Stew simply isn't prepared to take.  The reality is that he was probably frustrated that the exchange even went as far as it did - 99% of sentient human beings don't tolerate people talking to them like Stew talks to anyone who disagrees with him, so he's used to 99% of people walking away at a very early stage and leaving him free to declare a hollow triumph.  I didn't, and it was pretty clear that annoyed him - he became progressively more agitated as the day and evening progressed.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the heat and the blue language, I do actually think it was a worthwhile exercise, because he revealed far more than he intended to or probably even realised that he did.  A lot of the most interesting clues lay in what triggered him the most.

* It became very obvious at an early stage that he realised he'd been rumbled and that his claim that the SNP are certain to win a minimum of 65 constituency seats next year simply didn't stack up.  What's still unclear is whether the claim was just a gigantic bluff from the start or whether he just didn't bother checking each constituency's numbers thoroughly enough.  Before he descended fully into the insult-fest, I tried to probe him on whether he stood by his claim that East Lothian is a certain SNP hold (probably his dodgiest claim of the lot, although there are several others), and his reasons for standing by it if he did, but he just flatly refused to engage - he first tried to deflect by pretending it didn't matter whether he stood by the claim, and when that didn't put me off he then went full Trump and denied he'd ever made the claim in the first place!  I'm afraid it's there in black and white - he declared on his blog that the SNP will win 65 seats and specified the eight that they will not win, and East Lothian was not on that latter list.  He even helpfully provided a map in which East Lothian was shaded SNP yellow!

As for his suggestion that it doesn't even matter whether his 65-seat claim was valid or garbage, I'm sorry but it absolutely does matter, and I'll explain why.  With 65 constituency seats, which would be an all-time record high for the SNP, it's at least arguable that the balance of probability might be against them winning any list seats at all.  But once you accept, as it seems that Stew now tacitly does (although good luck to anyone in dragging a direct admission out of him), that a sub-60 haul is far more likely, the list arithmetic changes significantly and the probability moves in favour of the SNP winning at least some list seats, as they have done in every previous Holyrood election that has ever been held.  That's crucial, because Stew's basic claim is that every single SNP list vote will be wasted.  He's not just saying that some or even most will be wasted - for him it's absolutely essential that the claim is all votes because that's the only way he can mess with SNP supporters' heads and try to convince them that they are doing something counter-productive or even irresponsible if they don't vote "tactically" on the list for a fringe Yes party.

Unfortunately for him, the claim just doesn't make sense once the SNP are only in the 50s in constituency seats - but of course he flatly refused to accept that, and put up an alternative brick wall of utter gibberish about how the SNP would supposedly win zero list seats unless they "lost at least five constituency seats in a single electoral region".  Anyone who was nodding along with that as if it was some sort of valid point needs to have a stern word with themselves.  I asked Stew how it was possible that the SNP have list seats *right now* without having lost five constituency seats in a single region.  Unsurprisingly he didn't/couldn't answer.

* In my previous blogpost, I've already drawn attention to the most significant part of the exchange, in which I invited him to take the opportunity to rule out endorsing Reform UK at next year's election and he flatly declined to do so.  That's extraordinary, because any mainstream blogger or commentator who didn't want to be tied down would probably have said something like "I'm not going to be drawn on which party I might endorse, but it goes without saying that I won't be endorsing a far-right party like Reform".  In Stew's case, he might also have been expected to rule out Reform on the grounds that they are anti-independence.  But no.  It seems that far-right anti-independence parties are not beyond the pale for Stew, and he expects people to regard it as normal that he deems them to be one of the menu of options he will be choosing from.

The issue goes beyond that, though, because literally in the minutes prior to him refusing to rule out the Reform endorsement, he had been repeatedly insisting that he was asking people to vote tactically on the list for a "non-SNP pro-indy party".  Even by admitting to the mere possibility that he might endorse Reform, he was directly contradicting what he had only just said.  The fact that he tied himself up in knots so quickly and without much prodding from me at all suggests that there's a basic lack of 'match-fitness' there - I suspect that these days he blanket-rejects all requests for media interviews that might conceivably be hostile, and so he's no longer used to being challenged or put on the spot (not least because he usually scares away anyone who tries it by calling them a c**t).  

* It's obvious that Alba is an incredibly sensitive topic for him.  He maxed out on the mockery as a way to avoid engaging when I asked him whether he condemned the expulsion of Chris McEleny, and whether he condemned the 2023 vote-rigging in the Alba internal elections, and why he refused all guest post submissions to Wings about the vote-rigging.  I suspect he is close to McEleny and that he probably is outraged by the expulsion, and for him that may well mark the end of his relationship with Alba - but he perhaps isn't ready to admit that yet because he fears a hostile response among the many Alba members in his readership.  But what was really weird was the sheer extent of his deranged fury (to use a classic Campbellite/McElenyite phrase), which he had clearly been nursing for several weeks, about the fact that I had identified him as the de facto co-author of the Wee Alba Book - something we might have expected him to be proud of, but which he apparently regards as a mark of shame.  To be clear, Alex Salmond unambiguously named Campbell as the Wee Alba Book editor in his speech to the 2021 Alba conference, and when I was on the Alba NEC in 2021-22, Salmond also gave us verbal updates along the lines of "Robin McAlpine has nearly completed his first draft and will be passing it on to Stuart Campbell for editing shortly".  Stew now claims that he didn't edit it at all, apart from "one word" (he refused to tell me what the "one word" was, and I'm sure we're all now gagging to know!).  But why in God's name does it bother him so much?  I think he's really, deeply embarrassed about his involvement with Alba - he knows he backed the wrong horse for a time, and that bothers him and almost shames him.  The same thing bothers me too, of course, but at least I've owned up to it.

* Without any prompting from me, he pre-emptively tackled the quotes from him that I had dug up from 2016 when he was still opposed to tactical voting on the list.  He clearly thought the most problematical quote was the one in which he claimed that tactical votes might completely backfire and leave us with five fewer pro-indy MSPs than we would otherwise have had.  He tried to make that go away with bluster about how it's not 2016 anymore and how voting patterns have changed and how the arithmetic no longer applies, etc, etc...which is 100% sheer sophistry.  If it was arithmetically possible for tactical voting to backfire in 2016, by definition it's arithmetically possible for tactical voting to backfire in 2026 - unless the electoral system itself has been altered in some way, which it has not.

* What I found almost dizzying from him was his Grand Old Duke of York routine about whether or not he was claiming to know the election result in advance.  When it suited him, it was obviously possible to know the result a year early ("James, you are mentally ill if you think the SNP have any chance of winning dozens of list seats!", etc), but when it didn't suit him, suddenly it became obviously impossible ("polls change, James!", "I can't even predict whether I'll be voting fascist myself yet!", etc).  I think to be charitable we were supposed to conclude that the election result is uncertain but only within very narrow and highly predictable parameters.  The problem for him there is that there are twelve months to go until polling day - and yet how much has changed over the last twelve months?  A Labour lead has been wiped out and replaced with a commanding SNP lead.  It only took Stew himself five months to transition from "there is zero chance of a pro-indy majority" to "a single-party SNP majority is 100% certain".  That's the extent of change that can occur over a short period of time, so Stew can't have it both ways - either all bets are off about how many list seats are up for grabs for the SNP, or he really is claiming to know an election result a year in advance, which is a fundamentally nutty claim.