Monday, December 17, 2012

A Win Is A Win?

Over at σ1, Corey Wallace exposes the flimsiness of the Liberal Democratic Party's smashing numerical victory in yesterday's House of Representatives election. (Link)

The key takeaway: the LDP received a smaller percentage of the proportional vote in winning in 2012 than it received in getting wiped out in 2009.

You read that correctly -- not a smaller number of votes, a smaller percentage of the vote.

Note to Abe Shinzo: 28% is not a mandate.

Later - The commenters nitpick -- AND FOR GOOD REASON.

4 comments:

jaichind said...

By my calculations LDP+NKP got 39.46% in the PR vote. In 2009 it was 38.2% so it was an small increase from 2009 when it was crushed. In absolute vote point of view it must have gone down.

Philippe said...

Congratulations to Mr & Mrs ‘None of the Above’ with their 41~47%(*) share of the vote… As predicted by the many polls and surveys. ‘Undecided’? I don't think it is the only explanation.

(*) Mr Wallace notes a participation rate of 59%, the terebi channel that was on at 8pm on sunday evening said it was 53%.

Anonymous said...

Just a nitpick, but wasn't 2009 26.7% and 2012 slightly higher at about 28%?

sigma1 said...

I think the final participation rate was confirmed by the papers at 59.3 percent. The LDP did a little better in terms of percentage of both PR and SMD votes, but did worse in terms of the actual votes received. The 28 percent was a rough estimate I gave- it turned out to be 27.6 percent, which was more than 26.7 percent in proportional terms...but arguably a couple of million votes less in absolute terms.