Background
The sad passing of very long serving Lib Dem councillor Robin Currie gave us cause to return to the Kintyre and the Islands ward. This part of Argyll and Bute had already had a by-election not very long after the full election in 2022, following the death of Independent John McAlpine. That’s on top of last year’s South Kintyre by-election, so it’s been a busy old time on the peninsula.
Given the SNP’s absolutely abysmal recent performance, I’d marked this out as a tossup between returning Independent Donald Kelly and the Lib Dems. That came with the caution that I wasn’t writing the SNP off entirely, just viewing their chances as a bit lower, enough to not include them in the tossup.
Headline Results
Councillors and Key Stats
1 Councillor Elected:
SNP: Anne Horn
Change vs 2022 By-Election (notional): SNP Gain from Independent (not really comparable)
Change vs vacating: SNP Gain from Lib Dem
Turnout: 31.4% (-2.8)
Electorate: 5406
Valid: 1678 (99.0%)
Spoiled: 17 (1.0%)
Quota: 840
2 Continuing Councillors:SNP: Dougie McFadzean
Independent: Alastair Redman
Candidates
SNP: Anne Horn
Conservative: Elizabeth Redman
Lib Dem: Douglas MacDonaldIndependent: Donald Kelly
Freedom Alliance: Alan McManus
First Preferences
Note: Independent Alastair Redman won 32.7%, the Greens 9.7% and Labour 3.0% in the 2022 by-election. In the full 2022 election, Independent John McAlpine won 23.5%, Redman 16.4%, and Labour 4.2%.
First Preference History
I have a pretty good record for predictions on Ballot Box Scotland, but I can’t get them all right! I would re-emphasise I hadn’t written the SNP off entirely, just viewed them as a more distant likelihood. In fact, the SNP won their best ever vote share in the ward thus far, a sentence I’m rather surprised to be typing in the current political context. Their share was likely boosted by a combination of the lack of an in-ward Independent, the absence of the Greens compared to the by-election, and the fact their candidate had an established history as a councillor already. That gave her what I know from years of covering these to be an utterly unbeatable first preference lead.
In something of an echo of the full 2022 election, a Redman ended up in a tie with another candidate. This time around however that was as a Conservative, tying with Independent Donald Kelly. As in that prior vote, transfers broke against the Redman, which is what allowed Kelly to proceed to the final head-to-head stage. Whilst Conservative results in the past two votes will have been depressed by the Independent Redman, much like the SNP I’m nonetheless a bit surprised at just how much of the vote they were able to gain given their poor result just two weeks prior.
The Lib Dems, who I had marked out as prospective winners, ended up in fourth place for the first time since 2012. They also had the smallest uptick of any of the returning parties, which does not suggest Argyll is yet going in the direction of the neighbouring Highlands and returning to the liberal fold. Lastly, the Freedom Alliance didn’t really register but did at least manage to cross into a full percentage point, unlike their prior appearance in South Kintyre.
Transfers
Two-Candidate Preferred
Two-Party Preferred
It’s basically impossible to overturn a first preference lead of over 20% in Scotland, so the SNP just had to wait out the sequential elimination of their opponents to seal their inevitable victory. They ended up with a very comfortable 18% lead over Kelly, suggesting you can’t just mount a comeback in a neighbouring ward less than a year after you resigned.
This is particularly notable as it’s only the second by-election the SNP have won since the full elections in May 2022. The significance of that has been a bit exaggerated by some (the SNP were only the actual 2022 winners in about a quarter of the wards that have had by-elections), but it will still give them a bit of comfort at a time they’ve been doing pretty poorly overall.
Had it gone to a purely party head-to-head, the SNP would have even more handily beaten the Conservatives with a 25.7% lead. The Lib Dems end up just 6 votes behind the Conservatives for determining who entered that TPP calculation, and had they faced off against the SNP it’d have been a little bit narrower on 49.1% to 31.3%, a 17.8% lead.
Detailed Results
Results by Polling District
The SNP’s clear lead in first preferences overall translates to a comfortable lead for them in every set of polling districts as well. It’s entirely possible that there are some highly localised leads for other candidates if we could see beneath the mergers, but a lot of the districts in this ward are below the 200 vote minimum to be separately reported even before accounting for the low turnout which brought loads of others below it.
The SNP’s best result, at over half of votes, was in the one district that could be broken out, which covers Tarbert. Kelly’s best results came from the Kintyre districts, perhaps unsurprising when you consider that his old ward covered the rest of the peninsula. For the Conservatives and Lib Dems it was Islay where they did best, sharing the same top block of districts which include Bowmore.
Second Preferences
The defining feature of second preferences in this election was that the largest bloc of voters for every candidate didn’t bother. That was most notable for the SNP, with nearly half of their voters doing a sole preference, which may reflect the fact they didn’t have any constitutionally-aligned alternatives standing; in the previous by-election, almost half had went for the Greens second.
Of those who did mark preferences, SNP and Lib Dem voters were most likely to mark the Independent second, but not massively more than they were one another. Kelly’s voters meanwhile preferred the Lib Dems, as did the Conservatives, who themselves were only the third most popular option for those voting for all of the other major candidates.
We’re about to tip into quite a busy summer and autumn of by-elections, with rather a lot already lined up never mind the potential for around 18 to arise from councillors who have just been elected as MPs. Much as I’m glad to have just had a week off of election coverage, I’m already wilting at the thought of that many elections to cover!
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