In Europe, Tactical Voting Was a Big Winner. In the U.S. It Is Harder.

France and Britain held elections last week, and the big winner turned out to be … tactical voting. In both countries, the election results showed the effectiveness of political parties coordinating to limit the choices that voters face — and of voters using that information to vote tactically against a party they oppose, even if that means not voting for their true first choice.

In the United States, President Biden’s main pitch to voters has been a call to vote against Donald Trump. But in the United States, political parties have more difficulty coordinating to shape voters’ choices.

I wanted to write about that this week because I think it’s a good illustration of something that’s really important but often gets lost in the drama of political battles: Similar political divides, when filtered through different political systems, can produce extremely different governments.

Understanding how the French and British results were achieved is, of course, a useful way to understand the political situation in those countries. But it can also shed light on the current situation in the United States, where political parties’ struggles to coordinate have had significant consequences.

Organizing tactical votes against a common enemy

In France, the far-right National Rally party finished in third place in the final round of parliamentary elections last weekend. That was a shock to many, because the party had finished first in the initial round of voting the week before and had seemed poised to form a government for the first time in its history.

The big story of why the party finished third seems to be about tactical coordination between and within the left and centrist parties. After the first round of voting, both the leftist coalition and President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right party strategically withdrew candidates from races in which they had come third, in order to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote.