David Burt’s February 18 election call places the island’s political opposition in a quandary.

As things stand, there could be four serious candidates on almost every ballot, with representatives of the One Bermuda Alliance — the official Opposition — the Free Democratic Movement and the independent grouping under the leadership of Sir John Swan vying to displace the Progressive Labour Party as the government.

Mr Burt, the Premier, will have been alive to this with his election timing. Running against a divided opposition massively improves his MPs’ chances of retaining their seats and a majority if the votes of those opposing the PLP divide three ways.

The evidence for that lies in the 2024 by-elections. In Smith’s North, Sir John ran a close second to the OBA’s Robert King — a seat where the departing incumbent had increased his vote in 2020 as the rest of the Opposition collapsed around him.

In that by-election, Mr King gained 209 votes or 36.4 per cent of the vote while Sir John was second with 184 votes or 32.6 per cent of the vote. The governing PLP’s Lindsay Simmons was third with 181 votes or 31 per cent.

That compares with the 2020 General Election where Michael Dunkley won 60.8 per cent or 503 votes and his PLP rival, Ernest Peets, trailed in with 39.2 per cent or 324 votes.

By-elections are notoriously poor predictors of General Election results because the stakes are lower — a government’s fate has never hung on a by-election result in Bermuda — and as a result turnout is low, with only the more dedicated partisan voters going to the polls.

Nonetheless, in the Smith’s North result, the aggregate opposition vote rose from 60.8 per cent to 69 per cent while the PLP’s share dropped to less than one third.

Had a single opposition candidate run, it is reasonable to assume that candidate would have improved on Mr Dunkley’s already strong performance.

The Sandys North by-election is even more telling.

Here, the PLP’s candidate, the Reverend Emily Gail Dill, running to succeed retiring Kathy Lynn Simmons, won with 162 or 35 per cent of the vote — a dizzying decline of 24 percentage points from the 2020 election.

The FDM’s Marc Bean was second with 108 or 23.6 per cent. Independent Ci’re Bean was third with 95 votes or 20.83 per cent and the OBA’s Carl Neblett was last with 91 votes or 19.96 per cent.

In 2020, Ms Simmons romped home with 431 votes or 59.04 per cent of the vote, Mr Bean was again second with 185 votes or 25 per cent of the vote and Jeff Sousa, of the OBA, was third with 114 votes or 15.62 per cent.

Had Mr Bean been able to simply turn out almost everyone who supported him in 2020, he would have won. Had all those who voted for opposition candidates voted for one anti-PLP candidate, that person would have romped home with 65 per cent of the vote in a constituency that has consistently voted for the ruling party since the single-seat constituency system was introduced two decades ago.

It is difficult to say with any certainty that would in fact have happened, since it is impossible to imagine if a voter whose candidate of choice was not on the ballot would have voted for someone else. It is also true that Ms Dill was very new to the constituency and that Mr Bean has a strong support base in Sandys North. But the numbers remain.

How they would translate in a General Election is also unknowable. Voters who may flirt with a protest vote for the opposition when nothing much is at stake in terms of the overall direction of the country might come back to the PLP. Equally, voters who support a third party or an independent who may have little chance of forming a government might move to the party that seems to have the best chance in a General Election, which seems likely to be the OBA.

Nonetheless, the risk of a divided vote is real and the likely beneficiary is the PLP at a time when, in a “normal election”, the odds are that it would lose many seats, if not its actual majority.

For the people looking to unseat Mr Burt and his party, this presents several difficult choices and very little time to make them, given that the Premier has also opted, not by accident, for a short election campaign of about five weeks.

The first but least likely is a formal merger of the groups under one party umbrella. This seems vanishingly unlikely, both because of time and because there is probably not enough common policy ground over which they agree.

The second is for the groups to come together in a formal alliance in which they would agree not to run candidates in seats where another party or grouping has a better chance of winning. Again, this would be difficult to achieve given the egos of the various candidates involved and their policy differences. Some kind of preliminary agreement on a potential coalition would also be necessary, which would challenging but not impossible.

The third and most likely option is that the groups run their slates of candidates and leave it to the voters to decide who has the best chance of winning and to plump for them — what is known as tactical voting. This is effectively what happened in Britain in July when the Conservative Party was hammered and voters rallied behind whoever they thought had the best chance.

In this, they were aided by the opposition parties, as the Labour Party put up token campaigns in constituencies where it knew it had no hope. The Liberal Democrats focused sharply on its winnable seats. This worked well as both parties secured near-record numbers of seats despite their vote shares falling. They also benefited from the far-right Reform Party taking votes on the Conservatives’ right flank while Labour and the Lib Dems vacuumed up centrist voters. There is no equivalent reform party to the left of the PLP, despite some of the FDM’s views.

Still, the Opposition cannot count on voters making the right choices on its behalf, especially because the independent candidates have little or no history and it is difficult to know how they will perform or where opposition voters would best coalesce.

It still seems unlikely, even if everything went right for the OBA, that it would win the 12 seats necessary to overturn the PLP’s majority, but without some kind of accommodation, it risks not making the advances that would deliver a stronger Opposition in the next parliament.