1872 Tumbran federal election

1872 Tumbran federal election
← 1868 3 May 1872 1876 →
All 350 seats to the Tumbran House of Representatives; 176 seats needed for a majority
Registered	13,788,493
Turnout	78.3% (Decrease 2.7%)
Prime Minister before election; William Butler; Federalist	Elected Prime Minister ; Henry Makepeace; Liberal

The 1872 Tumbran federal election was held on 3 May 1872 to elect the members of the 3rd House of Representatives of Tumbra. Held amidst several corruption scandals affecting the incumbent Federalist-Liberal government, the Federalists, the senior party in the government, were swept out of office. Their junior coalition partners, the Liberals, led by Deputy Prime Minister Henry Makepeace and which had been relatively untainted by the scandals engulfing the Federalist Party, won an absolute majority of seats and were able to govern alone. For the Liberals, this election consolidated their political control over the newly-ascended Western states, with the party winning 37 of the 50 seats in the region. The opposition Centre-Agrarian Party, beset by infighting, lost major ground and fell to third place in the election, losing over half their members in a result attributed to tactical voting.

The result of this election has been described as unique for being one of two times in Tumbran history where a party has gone from third place to first, the other being in 1876 when the Centre-Agrarians reversed their losses to win the election. This election, however, has been the only one in Tumbran history where a junior coalition partner won an election and formed government in its own right. The election result saw the beginning of a long historical process of the Liberals assuming primacy over the right-wing of Tumbran politics over the Federalists' early electoral dominance, eventually culminating in the merger of a moribund Federalist Party into the Liberals in 1900.

Background

In the intervening period since the last election, all three of the major parties had changed their leaders. Federalist leader and Prime Minister Richard Barker had retired in 1870, citing exhaustion and a disinclination to continue. Following the 1868 election, political violence had broke out in the north-western states, particularly from members of the True Westerners who had not supported their party's merger into the Centre-Agrarians and whom continued to agitate for a reversal of the Tumbran annexation of the west. Barker was particularly worried about how this would affect national unity, particularly amongst the remaining minority of the population which held latent pro-monarchist sympathies, despite the monarchy having been overthrown twenty years prior. The low-level insurgency that spread across Marlsbruhe and Grantfeldt took a toll on Barker's health, and the continued budget deficits run by the federal government were a major political issue of the day. When the insurgency had largely been pacified in 1870, with the capture and subsequent execution of rebel leaders on charges of treason, Barker decided it was an opportune moment to step down.

Barker would be succeeded by William Butler, who had served in Barker's cabinet as Minister for the Army. Butler had been one of the leading faces in the pacification of the west, was generally popular and had become the most recognisable member of Barker's cabinet after the Prime Minister himself. He saw off challenges from Treasurer Benjamin Northcote, Postmaster-General Jacob Yarborough, and, most notably and surprisingly, former vice-president Ralph Davidson, one of the nominal founders of the party who had lost his bid for the presidency in the 1870 election against Michael Turner and who was now seeking a return to partisan politics.

Liberal leader Alexander Henderson stepped down from his own role as Deputy Prime Minister in 1870, though in contrast to Barker's resignation, he had not wished to leave the role. However, a poor 1868 election result had meant that the Eastern wing of the Liberal Party had long since lost confidence in his leadership, and they were looking for someone who could lead the party to an election victory, rather than agreeing to being a junior partner in a coalition. While Minister for Western Affairs Anthony Yardley, who had also served as the last President of the Western Tumbran Republic, was courted by party leaders, he declined, citing that for him to assume the role just two years after joining the party would be inappropriate. The party eventually settled on Henry Makepeace, who had spent the last six years as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Makepeace, who was only 44, had always been seen as a future Liberal leader, though most had expected him to only become leader in the 1880s. However, he was popular with the public, and had made regular high-profile trips overseas to build up diplomatic relations with other countries, something that pro-Liberal newspapers were always eager to report in their columns. Makepeace had personally been reluctant to relinquish the Foreign Affairs portfolio, resenting having to focus on domestic policy, but simultaneously saw himself as the only Liberal able to lead the party to an electoral victory. He assumed office as Deputy Prime Minister five weeks after Butler became Prime Minister, the two having agreed to renew their coalition agreement until the end of the term.

Centre-Agrarian leader Samuel Lightfoot had himself stepped down in 1869, citing a desire to renew the leadership of the party. Much to his deputy leader, Francis Whitelaw's, chagrin, Lightfoot endorsed James Pearce, a young leader of the party who represented a seat in the north-eastern state of Napier, a region that other party leaders decided the party needed to make inroads in if it was to topple the Federalist-Liberal monopoly on power. Further angering Whitelaw, Pearce had saw fit to leave the former deputy leader out of his shadow cabinet, after Whitelaw actively campaigned against Pearce in the backroom discussions that had led to the latter becoming the leader of the party. Whitelaw had considered quitting politics, or splitting from the Centre-Agrarians, but privately resolved to stay on and wrest the leadership from Pearce by any means necessary. Two years later, when it came to light amongst party elders that Pearce had fathered a child in an illicit relationship, Whitelaw struck, despite Lightfoot privately persuading his former deputy that doing so would ruin the party. When the story went public, in no small reason due to people affiliated with Whitelaw spreading the rumour, Pearce stepped down in disgrace and Whitelaw assumed control of the party unopposed. Some derided this, however, deeming Whitelaw taking the reins of the party at that point as arranging deckchairs on a sinking ship. The method in which Whitelaw had strongarmed his way to the leadership had left him vastly unpopular with the public, but with Pearce out of the picture, there were no other Centre-Agrarians with enough national heft to lead the party.

Not long after Barker took office in January his government was beset by scandal. Commerce Minister Elijah Short and Minister for Public Works and Railways Clarence Chase were implicated, along with several other Federalist MPs, in the East-West scandal. This scandal saw the construction of the first national east-west railway from Hesham to Fontwell via Hoxford be taken up by a private corporation, the Central Esportivan Railway Corporation, which had bidded for and won the contract, overcharge the federal government for the bill. The company, however, had been invested in by Short, Chase, and the related personalities; after receiving the dividends from the overcharging, additional bribes had been made to create a regulatory environment friendly to the CERC and unfriendly to Holtzmann, who were their main rivals and who lost the contract to construct the Hesham-Fontwell railway. Short and Chase resigned, but remained as MPs, while investigations began.

When the furore from the East-West Affair died down in May 1870, a new scandal emerged when it was revealed by Federalist-unfriendly presses that Butler's private secretary, Kingsley Wilson, had been attempting to sell access to the Prime Minister for interviews to Federalist-friendly papers at the height of the East-West affair to try and paper over the scandal. Wilson resigned in the immediate aftermath, but there were now questions over how much Butler was attempting to launder his reputation amongst the eyes of the public. Butler's credibility nosedived in the aftermath, and was not helped by him attempting to nominate William Brown, an academic at Guildholm University with no previous public office, to the Federal Constitutional Court in February. To do so, however, Brown had to have occupied some public office beforehand, so the Federalist-controlled Senate attempted to confirm him for a judgeship at a lower federal court for a few days, before confirming him as an Associate Justice. When the Liberals got wind of the plan, they voted against Brown being confirmed to the Federal Constitutional Court, and Brown withdrew his nomination after a contentious few hours. In the aftermath, some Federalists considered forcing Butler to resign and replacing him with Ralph Davidson, who was still relatively popular despite his loss in the presidential election two years ago. A Davidson premiership, however, would undoubtedly spell the end of the coalition between the Federalists and Liberals, as the former vice-president was anathema to the latter party.

By this point, Makepeace was furious with Butler, and let him know as much in their private correspondence, where he threatened to resign from Cabinet and take the Liberals out of the coalition. He would eventually back down after being persuaded by party leaders who saw the party giving up two relatively influential portfolios, including the particularly valuable Foreign Affairs portfolio, as a mistake. Butler offered to give Makepeace a bigger role in governing in secret, essentially turning them into co-prime ministers for the last nine months of the coalition agreement. Makepeace would agree in secret, but in public he would aggressively court public opinion and distancing himself from the Federalists in the aftermath, writing opinion pieces in Liberal-friendly newspapers that were tantamount to the early release of their election manifesto. The 1871 budget, passed in February, was essentially written by the Liberal Party, but was unpopular enough that the Federalists had to carry the blame for the various cuts that dragged the budget deficit down to a manageable level. It was widely acknowledged by both Federalists and Liberals that the eight-year governing agreement between the two would not continue, and that Makepeace would be making a play directly for the office of Prime Minister.

Campaign

When Parliament was finally dissolved in March, both parties in the governing coalition declared they would not enter another coalition with the other. The Liberals, under Makepeace, were generally judged to have the better organisation at this point in time; they had spent the previous four years building up their organisational knowledge in the Southwest, and replicated their tactics in the East. Their strong focus on anti-corruption and sound economic management, together with their emphasis that they had some form of governing experience, played well with the public which had largely tired of the Federalists' scandals, yet which were unwilling to vote for the unpopular Centre-Agrarian Party.

The Liberals would end up dominating the campaign; even the most stridently pro-Federalist and pro-Centre-Agrarian newspapers would be forced to acknowledge reality and accept that the Liberals were likely to win the election. The columns written by Makepeace were widely syndicated as campaign material as the Liberal platform; he would also embark on an tour of the nation (while stridently avoiding the Hesham-Fontwell railroad, which he deemed "tarred by the sins of corruption and which shall not receive my Patronage until the circumstances of its construction are investigated.") He called for a persecution of Short and Chase, while managing to sidestep questions on how close he had been to them and why he had not been aware of their corruption.

The Centre-Agrarians largely floundered in their campaign. Their numbers had been boosted by their merger with the True Westerners shortly after the 1868 election, but they struggled to make their policies clear and party infighting largely dominated discourse surrounding their party. Their support in the West, which was regarded as softer than their support in the east, had evaporated, and several True Westerner MPs who had joined the party upon its merger chose to contest their seats as independents, in the belief that the party name was a drag on their personal fortunes. Underfunded and unpopular, the party racked up debts which severely curtailed their ability to spread their message through the newspapers, which were the main method of campaigning in the 1870s; surrogates were also reluctant to show up for them.

The small, left-wing Radical Party had attempted to latch onto the unpopularity of both the Federalist government and the Centre-Agrarians to try and gain popularity. They were now led by David Collins, one of the three Radical MPs who had been elected in 1864 and who largely continued the tactics the party had utilised for its two previous electoral campaigns. This time, they fielded fifty candidates, twenty-three of whom were independents who wrote in to the party and were officially endorsed by the party after the end of nominations.

Results and aftermath

The Liberals were swept into office on a swing that surprised even Makepeace. Later analysis showed that the Liberals were the beneficiary of tactical voting from both disaffected Federalists who did not wish to see Centre-Agrarians in government, Centre-Agrarians who detested the corruption in the government and who were turned off by Whitelaw, and Western supporters who flocked to the party in the aftermath of the pacification of the West. The Federalists fielded candidates in all fifty western seats, but none of them were elected. The strength of the Liberal victory in the popular vote can largely be put down to huge margins in the seven western states, who were initially afraid of the Federalists acting as spoilers in the region, but this proved to be not a concern in the final vote.

Makepeace would assume office as Prime Minister the following week, naming the first single-party cabinet in Tumbran history. Butler would resign as party leader and be replaced by Peter Humboldt, who had become Commerce Minister after Elijah Short's resignation, and who was now given the task of rebuilding the shattered party. Whitelaw, now in charge of a rump caucus of just fifty-four MPs, would be forced out of the office of Leader. Walter Robinson, who had served as the party's president and was amenable to both the Whitelaw and Pearce wings of the party, was named as his replacement.

Results

Party		Leader	Seats	Change	Votes	%	Change
	Liberal	Henry Makepeace	194	120	4,615,457	42.75	18.74
	Federalist	William Butler	99	Decrease40	3,224,882	29.87	Decrease5.46
	Centre-Agrarian	Francis Whitelaw	54	Decrease80	2,735,805	25.34	Decrease7.37
	Radical	David Collins	3	Steady	220,246	2.04	0.34
Total			350		10,796,390

Results by state

State	Federalist	Liberal	Centre-Agrarian	Radical
Alexandria	5	6			11
Bencoolen		5			5
Georgia	9	11	5		25
Keybrook	3	5	4		12
Raleigh	2	2	2		6
Thornton	3	4	4		11
Bechor	14	24	6		44
Finnley	3	13			16
Harren	2	2			4
Marcato	5	7	1		13
Napier	13	35	5		53
Straton	3	3			6
Caduke		3	1		4
Grantfeldt		9	5		14
Marlsbruhe		9	3		12
Clearmont	15	6	2	2	25
Dartmoor	5	3	3		11
Severn	7	8	4	1	20
Fremont		7	1		8
Lormark		4	1		5
Pesvern		2	1		3
Turvenal		3	1		4
Gamaliel	2		1		3
Iswilyn	4	5	2		11
Westmond	4	6	2		12
Universities		12			12
Total	99	194	54	3	350