Local Council by-elections 11th April 2024

[Foggy]

To play devil's advocate once again: a reminder that this is meant to be a message board dedicated to psephology. Preferential systems are in that sense "better" than FPTP in that they offer us more electoral data to analyse, even the superfluous final stage calculated by the IT program in Scotland.

Having said all that, I still don't think STV would be at all appropriate for electing either house of the UK Parliament.

[xenon]

The result in Inverness wasn't particularly close when you look at what happened in the 1992 general election!

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverness_Nairn_and_Lochaber_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

[Chris from Brum]

Anyway, despite this seeming on paper to be a slam-dunk for the SNP, they still haven't broken their duck since Humza Yousaf took over. It's really not a great look for him, if nothing else.

[Chris from Brum]

Mar 31, 2024 19:26:33 GMT evergreenadam said:

Mar 15, 2024 21:25:59 GMT Chris from Brum said:

Inverness South looks like the best chance of an SNP win under Hamza so far, but they've flunked every previous chance so who knows.

Inverness South certainly looks impossible for the Lib Dems to defend in a first past the post by-election. The gap in first preference votes was huge. I wonder how many ‘paper’ candidates get elected unexpectedly under the Scottish local government election system.

And in the end we couldn't quite do it, but it was closer than it had any right to be. This bodes reasonably well for future elections in that area.

[jamesdoyle]

GWBWI

LDm +43
Grn +1
Lab +0
Con -17
SNP -28

LibDems managed +8 in Inverness despite losing because of notionally being fourth last time. Lab and Con almost neck and neck in Harrogate on -3 and -4 respectively. A poor result for SNP.

[batman]

I was about to say, it looked like a neutral week from a Labour point of view

[Yaffles]

Apr 12, 2024 19:16:49 GMT batman said:

I was about to say, it looked like a neutral week from a Labour point of view

I would describe it as an irrelevant week for Labour

[jamie]

Apr 12, 2024 11:14:22 GMT ricmk said:

Question on my mind: The SNP local election results over the past year have been far far worse than Lib Dem local election results in 2014-5, and we can see further here how they are struggling on transfers.
We all know what happened to the Lib Dems in 2015. Why are we not projecting even worse for the SNP in these circumstances? I know Scotland-only polling has them falling back but not existentially. But local results, actual votes in the ballot box, paint a different picture. What are we missing?

The Lib Dems have historically overperformed in local elections, especially by-elections. Conversely, the SNP have in recent times surged in Scottish/Westminster elections but largely flatlined in local elections (with a good bit of churn of course). Their by-election performance is poor, but the most visible part of that is that they have a lot of seats to lose thanks to STV but wouldn’t have even won them under AV, and that’s before any swing takes place. It’s not clear to me that a falling SNP vote and consequently seat losses in by elections indicates forthcoming disaster in the way the equivalent Lib Dem vote usually would. 

[ntyuk1707]

Inverness South by-election result transferring out the independent vote (changes on 2022):

• LIB: 856 (27%) +13%
• SNP: 695 (22%) -21%
• CON: 650 (21%) -2%
• LAB: 447 (14%) +4%
• GRN: 272 (9%) +2%
• ALBA: 135 (4%) +2%
• SOV: 66 (2%) new

Were this swing applied to the result in Inverness, Skye & Ross-shire at the 2022 local elections and no Green/Alba candidates stood, the Lib Dems would have a majority in excess of 10%. This result undoubtedly reflects the current downward trajectory the SNP appears to be on at the moment based on current opinion polling. A fairly strong result for the Scottish Tories, more consistent with them holding 17-18% of the vote nationally than bleaker estimates putting them under 15% of the vote.

[MacShimidh]

Apr 12, 2024 17:56:34 GMT Chris from Brum said:

Mar 31, 2024 19:26:33 GMT evergreenadam said:

Inverness South certainly looks impossible for the Lib Dems to defend in a first past the post by-election. The gap in first preference votes was huge. I wonder how many ‘paper’ candidates get elected unexpectedly under the Scottish local government election system.

And in the end we couldn't quite do it, but it was closer than it had any right to be. This bodes reasonably well for future elections in that area.

In the end only 12 transfers at the last round made the difference. A cracking result, and pretty much everyone except the SNP has reason to be happy here.

I'm not hugely surprised by their collapse - the incumbent SNP councillor is a quasi-independent who at times has threatened to leave the party (and on one occasion actually did for a while). Whilst personal votes aren't what they once were in the Highlands (especially here in Inverness), he's been very well-known and popular in the area for ages, and I very much suspect his popularity has been inflating the SNP figure in recent years.

Happy enough the Independent won a seat at his third attempt as he seems a decent bloke, and I say that as someone who thinks the Highland Independents are generally a bit of a waste of space.