Win As One

Win As One was a campaign using the 2024 General Election to change elections forever. For people, for planet, and for principle – it’s time to demand an end to our broken politics. We set out to elect progressives who backed real change – starting with changing the voting system.

We wanted to not just change the government, but change the system.

We organised on the ground, endorsed candidates, and swapped votes to facilitate tactical voting for progressives who supported changing the voting system – and we won.

Our incredible community of local groups endorsed 41 candidates – and won 35 (85%) of the races they worked in. Those endorsements were not lip service or just lending our logo to boost tactical voting. Our groups went out campaigning on the ground and delivered more than 100,000 leaflets in our key constituencies.

That’s not a number that our team ever thought to reach for as a goal – but thanks to the work of around 120 Compass members and hundreds more volunteers in those groups we achieved it.

They were assisted by a team of 7 members of staff at Compass HQ, who’ve travelled out to meet them. From a Quaker house in Harrogate with honey dripping from the ceiling, to a backroom nightclub in Keynsham – we had incredible fun meeting people and organising to make change in the place they lived.

Nationally, our vote swap had swappers from 425 different constituencies – 65% of the whole country. We were swapping to support 95 critical seats, and we swapped hundreds of votes in:

  • Lewes
  • Westmorland and Lonsdale
  • Morecambe and Lunesdale
  • Truro and Falmouth
  • Derbyshire Dales
  • Ely and East Cambridgeshire
  • Loughborough
  • Brighton Pavilion
  • North East Somerset and Hanham

We were humbled and inspired by the support, labour, and enthusiasm of our members and supporters in helping with this. Over the course of the campaign, we called and texted over 5,000 of our base to drum up support for these candidates, with the help of a volunteer team of 54 that helped us call and text our supporters, that helped us coordinate the campaign, made memes, crunched numbers, and shared the word around with key allies.

Across the media, in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Byline Times, the Mirror and The i, we haven’t just made the case for a new politics, we have practised it.

This patient, relational work has secured big wins for progressive candidates who back PR. We must now build on those relationships locally and nationally to push our political agenda to build a much more equal and sustainable society, and critically the democratic reforms that will enable more transformative policies to be enacted.

This starts with proportional representation. The 2024 election is the most distorted in history: Labour won 63% of the seats on 33.9%% of the vote. And turnout has plummeted.

It is hard, if not impossible, to govern with consent, legitimacy and purpose when our democracy is so distorted.

Despite the voting system, the two main parties got just 58% of the vote between them – the lowest on record. It’s obvious we live in a multi-party democracy straining to break free from a system built for two.

These results prove what we have always said – that there is a big progressive majority in this country, waiting to win not via the smallest possible target but with the biggest possible dreams.

At the same time, under this system, we’ve just elected the most PR-supporting Parliament ever in UK history. At some point, those two realities must meet – and that can only mean one thing: change.

Before this election, little of that transformation was possible. Now it’s up to us.

 

Compass started
for a better society
Join us today