The PN did no worse than it did in 2004. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

Four days after Sunday’s landslide result for Labour, is there anything left to say? Well, we could begin by demanding a moratorium on that over-used word, ‘ironic’, when referring to Alfred Sant’s result.

And we could follow that up with a break from comparisons with the 2009 election. Let’s take, instead, a closer look at the neglected 2004 vote.

For what’s been missing in much of the commentary has been a sense of the base rates – the really critical numbers to compare.

Sant’s is a case in point. His election on the first count has provoked many barbs about the state of mind of a country that could elect the icon of anti-EU membership to an EP seat. But, if one focuses on the right numbers, the irony evaporates. No one needed to change his mind about Sant for him to do as well as he did.

The base rate here is the number of people who, over the past 10 years, have remained uncompromisingly convinced that joining the EU was a bad thing for Malta. Successive Eurobarometer polls have shown that number to fluctuate between 16 and 18 per cent.

We also know from past experience that the Eurosceptic hardcore is loyal to openly Eurosceptic candidates. In the 2009 election, Sharon Ellul Bonici, a marginal Labour figure but a well-known Eurosceptic, was eliminated late: just before Claudette Abela Baldacchino. (Ellul Bonici had also secured many hunters’ votes.)

Had Abela Baldacchino been impeded from taking up the MEP seat that was vacated last year, we might well have seen Ellul Bonici elected.

So, back to Sant and the key numbers. The quota this year amounted to roughly 14 per cent. The Eurosceptic segment, on its own, amounts to circa 17 per cent. Sant’s first-count votes amounted to around 19 per cent. Still think it’s ironic?

The base rate enables us to see two things. First, the country – Labour, Nationalist and ‘trans’ – hasn’t really changed its mind about Sant. Second, it’s actually remarkable that Sant’s vote isn’t higher. The votes he attracted from outside the Eurosceptic hardcore didn’t do much more than compensate for the hardcore votes that drifted elsewhere.

Base-rate neglect also features in the assessments of the PN’s result. Throughout this week, all the talk has been about how the PN has remained stuck at the same 40 per cent level as in the catastrophic 2009. One would think that 2009 represented a great fall from the heights of 2004. But how much did the PN actually obtain in 2004?

That’s right: 40 per cent, same as this year. Actually, marginally less. In each of all the three elections, the PN obtained circa 100,000 votes.

This fact is startling in one sense but consoling in another – for the PN party leaders, at least. After a year of utter depletion – defenestrated, demoralised, almost bankrupt, barely able to publicise its message – the PN did no worse than it did in 2004, when it had considerably more resources.

That’s an achievement.

One should not assume that 40 per cent is the rocky bottom. If the PN loses its nerve now, it can sink even further.

Back to the 2004 result: why has it been blotted from memory that the PN scored only 39.7 per cent, even though we do remember that Labour won?

There are good reasons. Whereas the 2009 result looked like deliberate, horrific electoral punishment, the 2004 result seemed like a careless accident.

In 2009, Labour mesmerised us with its 54.8 per cent of the vote. In 2004, Labour won with only 48.4 per cent of the vote.

It had increased its share of the vote from the general election the previous year by less than one per cent. Alternattiva, however, obtained 9.3 per cent. It was generally assumed that the result did not reflect the PN’s real support.

If the PN loses its nerve now, it can sink even further

After three straight elections with a 40 per cent result, however, it may be time to rethink our assumptions about the PN’s core vote and about the base rate – at least for secondary elections.

It is commonly assumed that the respective core votes of the PN and PL are the same size; 40 per cent each (of all voters) is the number usually waved around. But the two parties are not the same. We don’t even expect the same things from them.

Their respective core voters vary considerably in character. To start with, Labour’s demonstrate much greater attachment to the party media.

In local council elections, after 2000, Labour always managed to mobilise more of its core vote than the PN: around 85 per cent to the PN’s 70 per cent, no matter what kind of campaign the PN ran.

Other numbers suggest that, since at least 2003, Labour routinely manages to mobilise four core voters for every three that the Nationalists bring out to vote.

Labour’s core vote does look like it is, as many would assume, around 40 per cent of all voters. But the PN’s appears to be more like 30 per cent.

This is partly related to the PN’s long tenure in office and, therefore, its increasingly frayed relationship with its supporters. However, it also has to do with the socio-demographic profile of its core vote, which is more likely to be diffident towards its preferred party.

Given all these considerations, perhaps it’s time to seriously consider whether a 40 per cent result is the PN’s actual base rate for an EP election.

It would help us better understand where the real fault of the campaign lay. The strategy was based on mobilising voters by prodding them to ‘send a message’ to Joseph Muscat. However, it’s only core voters who respond to such a campaign. ‘Sending a message’ is a visceral exercise for dedicated adversaries or jilted loyalists. Non-core voters never feel as deeply. They don’t tend to respond to such campaigns.

If the PN had assumed that its base rate for EP elections was only 40 per cent, it would probably have realised that its main message was too narrowly cast.

These were not, of course, the only salient issues. For example, the PN has chosen to criticise Muscat for the long-term damage it says he’s causing to the country’s institutions: but long-term damage does not have immediate effects and the accusations will seem remote and exaggerated to many voters.

Long-term issues are unlikely to yield short-term results.

Overestimated base rates, therefore, are far from being the whole story of the election. However, giving more importance to the neglected 2004 election casts a new light on what happened last Saturday. It makes the electorate more legible, its behaviour more open to rational analysis – if, that is, we can bear to be more numerate and less fond of the idea that the country is sublimely inexplicable.

ranierfsadni@europe.com