Brexit is fading from the picture, although traces of its realignment remain - and the national question is key again.
“Here’s something to chew on. At the 2016 Holyrood election, the SNP won 46.5% of the popular vote, with which it managed to hold a lead of 23 points over the Tories in Banffshire & Buchan Coast and 9 points in Moray, but lose Eastwood by 4.5 points. Three years later at the 2019 General Election, the SNP won exactly 45% of the vote, with which it managed to win the latter’s coterminous constituency of East Renfrewshire with a margin of nearly 10 points, but lost the former equivalent constituency of Banff & Buchan by 10 points, and lost Moray by a single point. What this neatly demonstrates is that under the hood of fairly steady nationwide support for the SNP, drastic shifts have been taking place within the geographic coalition of the party. Its fortunes have blossomed in affluent suburban and strongly “Remain” voting areas, while falling back significantly in rural and/or coastal Eurosceptic regions.”
So began a previous piece of mine. In the end, it really didn’t play out that way. Relative to the party’s national performance, the SNP somewhat outperformed in its coastal northeast and rural Tayside heartlands, and slightly underperformed in affluent suburban seats. The SNP continues to hold several of the most Leave-voting constituencies in the country (Banffshire, Moray, Caithness, Angus South and Angus North), while the Tories hold one of the most strongly Remain-voting seats (Eastwood). At a glance, my impression of where I went wrong with my predictions is in underestimating the extent to which Leave voters would come home to the SNP, and underestimating the extend to which Remain voters would go back to their unionist parties. In Eastwood, it means that some Labour voters who lent their vote to Kirsten Oswald in 2019 may have stuck with Labour this time, or possibly switched to Jackson Carlaw. It means that some of the Tory voters who swung hard against Andrew Bowie in 2019 by switching to the Lib Dems came back to Alexander Burnett this time.
This election ought to officially mark the end of anything that can be described as “national politics”. Scotland’s electoral contests are now matchups between a ubiquitous SNP across every part of the country, pitted against local unionist party fiefdoms.
The biggest winner of this election was incumbency. The pattern across multiple constituencies where candidates of all parties stepped down was unmistakeable - ASNK, E. Lothian, Falkirk East all saw trends against the SNP where incumbents stepped down, while candidates like John Swinney, Richard Lochhead, Jackie Baillie and Gillian Martin hung on in fairly hostile territory by comfortable margins, belying the national environment.
It’s not “tactical” voting, it’s unionist consolidation. I for one don’t think it really makes sense to speak of “tactical” voters when in seats like Edinburgh Southern or Edinburgh Western, unionist parties have coalesced behind the red or orange ticket for 4 elections in a row now. At what point are we allowed to simply start calling them Lib Dems or Labour voters? At what point can we start calling the ancestral Liberals of Aberdeenshire or the Borders Conservatives?
It’s not just unionists - the SNP’s own vote was ridiculously well-distributed. As results from our northeastern seats that I considered extremely vulnerable started trailing in, I realised that something incredible was happening - we were holding these seats with hostile boundaries that had swung strongly against us over the last few years, on a far lower share of the national vote than I’d have anticipated us to need to hold them. When my final prediction had B&BC as a narrow lean towards us, I was expecting an on-the-day national voteshare of somewhere around 51%, not the 47% we actually secured. On those margins, I’d have expected us to lose B&BC by 5 points, win Moray by 1 point and lose Aberdeenshire East by two points. instead, we won them by 3, 8 and 5 points respectively. Likewise, East Lothian and Ayr had no business swinging to us on the shares that they did - especially Ayr, where John Scott was defending 20 years of incumbency.
Regardless of national environment, the unionist vote becomes more *effective* against the SNP at each election. This process won’t be stopping any time soon - there are very few places that can still be described as three-way battlegrounds. For the same reason, the idea of the “national environment” is becoming less and less useful in telling us much about margins. That said, it’s still a useful metric for vote share.
In a lot of seats where Labour may have had an outside shot, they’re now miles from where they need to be. This isn’t changing any time soon, and the party’s underperformance in greater Glasgow and Fife relative to 2019 is a stark warning to Anas Sarwar.
What on earth is happening in Shetland? I really didn’t see a swing of that size coming. Given that the Lib Dems only exist as a party of fiefdoms now, even one of those seats becoming a marginal spells terrible news.
Edinburgh’s inexorable yellow march continues. Ben MacPherson and Ash Denham significantly increased their majorities. Gordon MacDonald did too. Angus Robertson smashed it out of the park in Edinburgh Central, against the warnings of most election models and swingometers - just as I expected him to. What caught me off guard, however, is how much Catriona MacDonald outperformed her 2019 result in Southern - the SNP got 25% to Ian Murray’s 48% in 2019, but got a much more impressive 37% to Daniel Johnson’s 45% in 2021. Should the personal vote-getting Murray machine ever fold for business, the Labour vote will likely splinter to other parties and the SNP will be in a good position to win.