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During 23 years with The BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry reporting major events has always loomed large, and often number crunching is essential – this is now put centre stage by new information coming to light about the victory by Donald Trump.
As anyone who knows me will testify, I am not very good with numbers.
I am all right with words (witness The Eye), but I have to concentrate extremely hard to arrive at accurate totals – checking, re-checking, and using a calculator.
It seems a shame that Donald Trump doesn’t do the same.
Mr Trump won 312 votes in the Electoral College (EC). It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of results for US presidential elections.
The final 2024 popular vote tally is unlikely to be known until December, but it will include the huge blue state of California.
When he lost in 2020, Mr Trump got a little more than 74 million votes. So while it’s true that much of the country moved to the right in this election, it’s also true that there was some voter apathy if, at the end of the day, turnout is down from then.
Of course, absurdly, he never conceded defeat in this election, and rang up the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes”, which is crucial evidence after Mr Trump (and others) was accused of a “criminal racketeering enterprise” for prosecution in The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al.
Again, numbers are at the heart of all this.
However, at least I am aware of my weakness in this area, so I know everything must be triple-checked, whereas Mr Trump says things that even I know are just plain WRONG.
After his last (real) victory in 2016, for example, Mr Trump said it was a “landslide” (and books have been written about it), which it WASN’T – he actually LOST the popular vote by 2.87 million votes.
He may actually win it this time (just), but again he is likely to claim that it was a “landslide” which even at this stage we know is totally bonkers.
It hasn’t just been in American elections either where the numbers have been central.
I have covered innumerable ones in the UK as a journalist, and even been an agent for a candidate.
In the 2021 elections to the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC) the governing Labour Party’s share of the constituency vote increased by over five percent, and the regional vote by more than four per cent, with thirty Labour MSs elected, accounting for exactly half of the 60 seats.
The Conservatives became the WP/SC’s second-largest party, as well as the official opposition to the Welsh Government (WG) with 16 MSs elected, five more than their 2016 result.
The Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru (Plaid) had 13 MSs elected, one more than in 2016.
The Welsh Liberal Democrats (WLD) lost their single constituency seat from 2016, but gained a regional list seat, keeping their total of one seat.
UKIP were wiped out, when they had seven seats in the 2016 election, and the voter turnout was 46.6 per cent.
At the General Election (GE) it was much the same for any journalist covering what happened – a good grasp of figures was essential.
Labour’s vote share was 33.7 per cent, the lowest of any majority party on record, but they won 211 more seats than the previous general election in 2019.
The Conservatives were reduced to 121 seats on a vote share of 23.7 per cent, the worst result in its history. The party lost 251 seats in total, including all of those in Wales.
The combined Labour and Conservative vote share was just 57.4 per cent, the lowest since the 1918 general election.
Smaller parties took a record 42.6 per cent of the vote in the GE: the Liberal Democrats, made the most significant gains, of 72 seats with a total of 3.5 million votes.
These sort of figures might befuddle a person, so they must be checked as they are important.
Perhaps Mr Trump should do the same, before he declares the result in America ‘a landslide’.
As he surely will…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when numbers were often crucial so always had to be checked) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – Phil is all right because it is a story without numbers, and he notes the importance of the kind of undercover reporting he has pursued, as the technique has exposed the terrible conditions experienced today by migrant workers.
