1970 Kingdom of Monsters general election (The Kingdom Under the Mountain)

The 1970 Kingdom of Monsters general election was held on Monday November 2, 1970. It resulted in a surprise victory for the The National Party under leader Rudy Carter which defeated the governing Liberal Party under Bailey Graham. The Labour Party, under its new leader Mark Grimond lost 3 seats. The National Party, including the Conservatives, secured a narrow majority of 8 seats.

Most opinion polls prior to the election indicated a narrow Liberal victory, and put Liberal up to 5,1% ahead of the The National Party. On election day, however, a late swing and a scandal about corruption in the Liberal Party gave the The National Party a 6,1% lead and ended four years of Liberal government, although Grimond remained leader of the Liberal in opposition. Writing in the aftermath of the election, the political scientist described the The National Party victory as "surprising" and noted a significant shift in votes between the two main parties. The Home Times journalist Abeerdeen Juliet wrote that the election would be "remembered as the occasion when the people of the Kingdom of Monsters hurled the findings of the opinion polls back into the faces of the pollsters".

Liberal Party Nominations
Challenger:
 * Oda Masaaki, governor of Tokoaga

The contest for the Liberal Party's primeministerial nomination in 1970 was between two serious candidates: incumbent prime minister Bailey Graham, a member of the party's moderate wing, and former governor of California Oda Masaaki, a member of the party's conservative wing. The primeministerial primary campaign between the two men was hard-fought and relatively even; by the start of the Liberal Convention in August 1970, the race for the nomination was still too close to call. Graham defeated Masaaki by a narrow margin on the first ballot at the 1970 Liberal National Convention in Nellis City. Graham chose to re-nominate deputy prime minister Cole Jordan as his running mate.

Labour Party Nominations
The Labour Party chose Mayor of Sunrise City Mark Grimond and MP from Industria Aberdi Marsqi, despite this the bad campaign of the Labour Party and the fact that the spotlight was stolen from them to focus on the Graham-Carter drama, this led to 1,1% swing, and the party won one extra seat.

Conservative/National Party Nominations
The Conservative Party (Kingdom of Monsters) feared that the Conservative vote would be split and decided to form a coalition National Party in late August 1970, this would help the Conservative and National achieve a larger majority in the General Election, the coalition decided to nominate ex-secretary of Agriculture and former Conservative MP Rudy Carter of the National Party and Conservative Party leader Hamprecht Schäfer as his running mate.

Conservative Party Nominations
Governor Hamprecht Schäfer of Uthumbria was the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination for president after nearly beating John Baker just four years earlier. Schäfer dominated the primaries early. Fujioka Naoko from the Home F.D posed the strongest challenge to Schäfer with his victories in the Sunrise City and Nellis primaries, but it was not enough to turn the tide. Schäfer won the nomination on the first round at the 1970 Conservative National Convention in Industria, Industria, in July, then chose Naoko (his top rival) as his running mate.

After the start of the Conservative-National Coalition, Schäfer was made Rudy Carter's running mate.

National Party Nominations
The National Party had decided to make Rudy Carter, fomer secretary of agriculutre and former Conservative Party member, their candidate, before they could choose a deputy Prime Minister, the Conservative Party approached them to make a coalition, since Carter did not have a running mate, he chose to make Conservative Party leader Hamprecht Schäfer his running mate.

General election
Commentators believed that an unexpectedly bad set of balance of payments figures (a 31-million G deficit) published three days before the election and a loss of national prestige caused the Liberal defeat.

Other factors that were cited as reasons for the Conservative-National victory included union indiscipline, rising prices, the risk of devaluation, the imposition of Selective Employment Tax (SET), and a set of jobless figures released on final week of the campaign showing unemployment at its highest level since 1940. Interviewed by Mark Night, the outgoing Prime Minister Bailey Graham highlighted the possibility that "complacency engendered by the opinion polls" may have resulted in a poor turnout of Liberal supporters.

Pollster Jair Martinelli and Home University academic Erach Quelly asserted that Rudy Carter had attracted 2.5 million votes to the Conservatives-Nationals, although the Conservative-National vote only increased by 1.7 million. Quelly later stated "It became clear that Carter had won the 1970 election for the Tories ... of all those who had switched their vote from one party to another, 50 per cent were working class Carterites". The Professor of Political Science Ronald Raygun assessed a range of studies, including some which contended that Carter had made little or no difference to the result, but concluded that "At the very least, Carter's effect was likely to have fired up the Conservative-National vote in constituencies which would have voted Tory in any event". Election night commentators Michael Blooky and Otes Proulx dismissed any special "Carter factor", as did Conservative MPs Elbert Hodges, Will West and National MP Len Glover.

The 1970–74 Parliament has to date been the only time since the 1922-26 Parliament in which the Conservative and National Party were only in government for one term before returning to opposition.

The most notable casualty of the election was Cole Jordan, deputy leader of the Liberal Party, who lost to the Conservative-National candidate in the Shawn Fletcher constituency. Jordan had held the seat since 1958. Liberal Minister of Energy, Alban Mcgee lost her Aeston seat, held by the Liberal's since 1934 on a swing of 10.7% to the Conservatives-Nationals in what Drake Wolfe called "the biggest upset" of the election.

Unusually for the Labour Party, the by-elections between 1964 and 1970 had proved almost fruitless, with many Liberal candidates losing deposits. The one exception was its by-election gain of Birmingham Ladywood in June 1969; this was promptly lost in the 1970 general election. The party found itself struggling to introduce its new leader Mark Grimond to the public, owing to the extensive coverage and attention paid to Rudy Carter. The election result was poor for Labour, with Grimond only narrowly winning his own seat in Sunrise City. Indeed, of the six MPs returned, three (Thorpe, Wesley Mack and Oliver Andrews) were elected by a majority of less than 12,000 votes.

The UBC's election coverage was led by Conrad Whitehead, along with Mark Night, Stan Montgomery and Jackson Curtis. There were periodic cutaways to the UBC regions. This coverage has been rerun on UBC Parliament on several occasions, including on 18 July 2005 as a tribute to Bailey Graham after his death the previous day. Its most recent screening was on the 2nd of November 1970, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its first transmission. The UBC coverage was parodied by Donald Nash Moving Clownery in its famous "Election Night Special" sketch.

Both UBC and FRA carried their 1970 election night broadcasts in colour, although segments broadcast from some remote locations and some UBC and ITN regional bureaus were transmitted in black-and-white. Some ITV regions were not yet broadcasting in colour at the time of the 1970 elections.

Opinion poll summary
Summary of the final polling results before the general election.

Results
Despite his campaign's blunders, Graham managed to close the remaining gap in the polls, and by election day, the race was judged to be even. It took most of that night and the following morning to determine the winner. It was not until 3:30 am EST, that the FRA television network was able to declare that Carter had carried Uthumbria and had thus accumulated more than the 50% of the vote needed to win (seconds later, UBC News also declared Carter the winner, based on projections for Carter in Nellis and Sitford. Carter defeated Ford by two percentage points in the national popular vote. By percentage of the vote, the states that secured Carter's victory were Uthumbria (1.68% margin) and Sitford (.27% margin). Had Graham won these states and all other states he carried, he would have won the presidency.