Background
Scotland’s exhaustingly busy season of by-elections continued last week with four-in-one, three of which were in Glasgow. The one that wasn’t was for Highland’s Fort William and Ardnamurchan, following Lib Dem councillor Angus MacDonald becoming Lib Dem MP for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire. Although I had a bit of a break over the weekend as a result of being knackered from my house moving process and so many by-elections, I needn’t have bothered. I’d have been as well writing this one up on Friday regardless, as neither the poll tables nor the Glasgow by-election results materialised over the weekend anyway.
In my preview, I pointed out both the massive Lib Dem surge in this part of the country lately, and the fact their candidate was a former Independent councillor for the ward. Although he’s spent time as a Conservative (somewhat mirroring the MP he works for and was standing to replace), the combination of an Independent past and Lib Dem banner now seemed to me like a dead cert for victory.
Headline Results
Councillors and Key Stats
1 Councillor Elected:
🟠Lib Dem: Andrew Baxter
Change vs 2022 (notional): Lib Dem Hold
Change vs vacating: Lib Dem Hold
Turnout: 27.3% (-17.7)
Electorate: 8985
Valid: 2424 (99.0%)
Spoiled: 25 (1.0%)
Quota: 1213
3 Continuing Councillors:
🟡SNP: Sarah Fanet
⚪Independent: Thomas MacLennan
🟢Green: Kate Willis
Candidates
🟠Lib Dem: Andrew Baxter
🟢Green: Marit Behner-Coady
🔴Labour: Susan Carstairs
🔵Conservative: Fiona Fawcett
🟤Libertarian: Nathan Lumb
🟡SNP: Rebecca Machin
First Preferences
Note: Thomas MacLennan won 9.3% in 2022.
First Preference History
When I’m right, I’m right: not only did the Lib Dems come first in votes, they won a stonking majority of first preferences and thus this didn’t need to go on to transfer rounds. I would caution that this is the kind of ridiculous share you get from such a candidate with the low turnout of a by-election, but I’m not 100% convinced it’d carry over to a full election. The SNP meanwhile took a fair blow to their support, amounting to their second lowest vote share thus far, as well as having their 2021 by-election result knocked off the top spot overall.
For the other Holyrood parties, the scale of Lib Dem victory translated to a worst-ever result for each. The Greens ended up the least impacted of the three returning parties in terms of absolute share lost, enough to put them in a very distant third place. Labour meanwhile were able to pip the Conservatives into fourth by just two votes after being absent for a couple of runs. The Libertarians… well, they were certainly on the ballot paper, that’s true.
Two-Candidate Preferred
Obviously since the Lib Dems won on first preferences alone there weren’t any transfer rounds, but we can use the detailed data to run it to a head-to-head out of curiosity anyway. As you’d expect this shows an absolutely astronomical lead for the Lib Dems, though it is a bit less of a swing than the first preferences, simply because they had already hoovered up so many later preferences in their 2022 outing.
It’s something of a shame this didn’t need any transfer rounds because Libertarian preferences would have equalised Labour and the Conservatives, which would have brought rules about who to eliminate in case of a tie at a given stage into play. I’m too lazy to go check them right now but I’d assume that it’d be the Conservatives out first, as the party that had fewer first preferences and/or (identical in this case) fewer preferences at the previous round.
Detailed Results
Results by Polling District
It’s very hard to get this kind of lead in a ward overall without leading in every polling district, and on the surface that’s what appears to have happened here. The small size of rural districts and the resulting need for box mergers could potentially disguise one or two SNP hotspots, but I’d guess probably not. The districts covering Kinlochleven (where the winner lives, I think), Glencoe and Ballachulish ended up their strongest patch, as it was for the Greens. The SNP ended up doing best in a scattered batch of districts including Lochaline and northern Fort William; Labour and the Conservatives in the bulk of Ardnamurchan; and the Libertarian southern Fort William.
Second Preferences
Second preferences are often relatively dull, following similar patterns, but this batch is quite interesting actually. The Lib Dem voter base split almost evenly between the Conservatives, Labour and SNP, with just 4 votes separating the first and third most preferred options, leaving the Greens a good bit behind. That’s despite the fact that in a break from the norm, Green voters were themselves most likely to opt for the Lib Dems rather than the SNP, whose voters in turn did stick to tradition with a Green-flowing plurality.
No surprises though that Labour and the Conservatives also favoured the Lib Dems, to the extent that a majority of Conservative second preferences flowed their way. Of the very few votes cast for the Libertarians, the largest bloc went towards the Conservatives.
Much to my relief the pace of by-elections is slowing a bit as we run out of new MPs to replace. Nonetheless we have two such by-elections this week at opposite ends of the Central Belt. One takes us to West Dunbartonshire’s Kilpatrick ward, one of the strongest Labour wards in the country, and the other to West Fife and Coastal Villages.
If you find this or other Ballot Box Scotland output useful and/or interesting, and you can afford to do so, please consider donating to support my work. I love doing this, but it’s a one-man project and takes a lot of time and effort. All donations, no matter how small, are greatly appreciated and extremely helpful.
(About Donations)
