The volatility of British voter sentiment combined with the underwhelming quality of its two major candidates for the prime ministership combined last Thursay to unleash “Cleggmania” upon the United Kingdom. Nick Clegg, the personable “fair talking” Liberal Democrat leader, was a smash hit with an audience of 9.4 million viewers. Far from this election campaign being universally ignored, more than a third of TV viewers tuned in, making it the evening’s highest rating program. Of those who watched, most declared Clegg the winner.

The political and media establishments were taken by surprise, with many pundits predicting the Clegg bubble will burst. Across all polls, however, the bounce has continued over the weekend. The most recent Guardian/ICM poll taken since the leaders’ debate has the Liberal Democrats surging 10 points to 30%, well ahead of Labor and just behind the Conservatives.

The seriousness of the Liberal Democrat challenge to the Labor and Conservative parties is demonstrated by Brown’s and Cameron’s panicked reactions. Both have canceled scheduled party broadcasts that would have attacked each other, and are now turning their fire on the new kid on the block. Cameron’s strategy is to claim “a vote for Clegg is a vote for Brown”, while Labor’s strategy is to embrace the Liberal Democrats in a kiss of death, saying they would be happy to work with them in coalition.  Clegg, touring Wales where he hopes to knock off some Labour seats, declared he was in it to win — he “wants to be prime minister” and “a vote for the Liberal Democrats is what it says on the tin”.

So, can the Liberal Democrats actually win? If not, why not?

The answer is more complicated and says a lot more about the British electoral system and party strategies than a simple swingometer will allow. The fact is the Liberal Democrats are trapped by their own success at adapting to the dysfunctional electoral system. Projecting the polling results onto a uniform swing pendulum produces perverse results, whereby even if the Liberal Democrats poll higher than either Labor or Tories, they still end up with the smallest number of seats. In fact, using such a device also predicts that Labor could perversely end up the largest party in parliament with just 25% of the vote even where the Liberal Democrats and Tories win 30% each.

It is not merely the perversion of the first-past-the-post electoral system that is to blame for this reading, but the remarkable adaption of the three main political parties to this perversion. The Liberal Democrats in their various forms, as the smaller party, struggled throughout the 1980s and early ’90s to gain representation in the FFP system. Similar to the Democrats and subsequently the Greens in Australia, the third party was frustrated by a high uniform vote and minimal return in seats. Facing electoral oblivion, their chief strategist Lord Rennard  spearheaded a new strategy, which was enshrined in the Liberal Democrats campaign manual. This was a strategy essentially of local insurgency, based around strong local candidates campaigning on the ground on local issues.

Lord Rennard and his team successfully transformed the liberal bourgeois descendants of the Whigs into a permanent local campaign machine. His maxim “the next campaign starts the day after election day” embodied this cultural as well as strategic shift. The manual is distributed to party candidates and activists and provides templates for the decentralised production of local campaign literature, letters and newspapers. The party transformed itself into a party of local government, creating a pool of talent from which to train and select candidates with local knowledge and support. Rather than fight a general election across the whole nation, the party would pick certain winnable seats and target its resources towards them. The result of this strategy was that the Liberal Democrat national vote declined in the short to medium term, but their share of seats began to increase.

Local campaigning however was only half the story of the Liberal Democrats’ adaption to the FFP system. The other was the embrace of ‘strategic voting’. Where the Liberal Democrats came close to or out-polled one of the major parties, the strategy was to to appeal to the supporters of the lesser of Labor or Tory to vote Liberal Democrat in order to stop the other. The slogan of ‘Liberal Democrats Are Winning Here’ on so many placards, combined with extensive polling and polling dissemination embodied this strategy. Over time, strategic voting has meant that while the UK nationally may appear a three party system, on an electorate by electorate level the FFP system means it remains a two party system. Electorates where the Liberal Democrats are strong are often not ‘three way’ contests, but rather between Liberal Democrat and Labor or Liberal Democrat and Conservative. Similarly, the Liberal Democrats have not polled well on election day in seats where the contest is accepted by voters as being between Tory and Labor. This is the real reason behind the regional variation in past election results that creates the perverse results of the national swing pendulum.

The Liberal Democrats are in an awkward position, as Cleggmania has taken them by surprise as much as the other parties. At the beginning of this election, they were targeting 100 seats. It is no coincidence that something around this number is the highest the swingometer will realistically allow.

So, to return to the original question of can the Liberal Democrats win? The answer is yes — but only if the British voting public rejected en masse the notion of strategic voting and if Liberal Democrats changed their entire campaign strategy to target a higher number of seats — a highly risky proposition this late in the campaign. The volatility of the British voting public and the underwhelming performance of the Labor and Tory leaders are too great to rule out the Liberal Democrats completely, sending political betting markets into turmoil. What Liberal Democrats have been planning for, however, is a hung parliament where they will make electoral reform the linchpin demand for a coalition with either Labor or the Conservatives and hope for Cleggmania in 2015.

Dr Aron Paul is a Melbourne writer and historian. He is a former president of the Australian Democrats and taught politics and international relations at La Trobe University 2005-9.