SWING AND A MISS
Fittingly on the same day the US went to vote in its midterms, the dean of election gurus failed to hit the necessary benchmarks to keep breathing, aged 98. Psephologist (or fancy word for election scientist) David Butler was a maths geek who loved to parse cricket stats before the WWII pause in cricket championships shifted his analytical forte to UK elections. He rediscovered and brought to wider use the cube law, which states that the party that wins more votes disproportionally receives more seats. He was a face of election night on the BBC for 30 years, where he brought to the forefront further electoral innovations such as the swingometer and exit polls which were effective at predicting results in more politically-homogenous times. While multiparty systems/gerrymandering (delete as applicable) render many of his innovations as antiquated today, his psephology expertise continued to shine with an accurate assessment of the 1997 UK election and continuing to commentate on elections in the mid 2010s. Above all we’d not be currently deciphering what a 55.3% Democrat batch in Maricopa means without the groundwork David Butler laid.
Beyond his psephology work, Butler was a lifelong friend of Tony Benn, and became subject to a bizarre conspiracy theory where some tried to connect Harold Holt’s disappearance at sea to Butler’s criticism of the Aussie PM from days before. Butler’s scathing critique was that Holt was “a disappointment”. Funeral Furore was the sole vote for David Butler, with 1 out of 497 teams a slight swing in his favour compared to 1 out of 515 teams last year.
David Butler
17 October 1924 – 8 November 2022, aged 98
💀💀💀💀💀 + 👻 = 9 POINTS