As the 2026 Scottish Parliament election approaches, keep up to date with all the latest polling and analysis on Ballot Box Scotland’s Holyrood Hub page!
Uniquely amongst the UK’s legislatures, to this day the Scottish Parliament has yet to see anyone from a party to the right of the Conservatives directly elected to the chamber. The DUP and TUV are firmly established in the Northern Ireland Assembly. UKIP won a couple of by-elections ahead of and then held onto one of those seats in the House of Commons in 2015. They went on to a breakthrough into the Senedd Cymru in 2016. Before their goal of leaving the EU was achieved, the UK sent big UKIP (and in 2019, the successor Brexit Party) contingents to the European Parliament.
When the Brexit Party rebranded to Reform UK, it initially looked like it wouldn’t really go anywhere. It’s easy to forget given all that has happened since, but 2026 is not Reform’s first run at Holyrood. Ahead of the 2021 election they even secured an MSP in the form of Michelle Ballantyne, who quit the Conservatives where she had sat very much on the right wing. They amounted to absolutely nothing, winning fewer votes than other right wing fringe outfits like the Scottish Family Party, Abolish the Scottish Parliament, and even the anti-vax Freedom Alliance.
How times have changed. Reform burst back onto the scene in the run up to the 2024 UK Election, after Farage backtracked on his intention not to stand for election. He and four other candidates would go on to establish the first serious far-right grouping in the Commons. Whilst none of these new MPs hailed from Scotland, the party found a full slate of candidates and recorded a credible share for the very first time. Since then, they’ve surged in the polls, and the genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
Holyrood History
Note: For consistency, all current polling average references and projections in the Party Profiles series are based on the last data point by the 1st of April 2026, as it was at time of publication.
Reform UK (and UKIP) Vote Share at Scottish Parliament Elections
Given that Reform UK traces their pedigree to UKIP, right down to both being fronted by (and seemingly incapable of operating without) Nigel Farage, it makes sense to look back over how that party performed: poorly. Of the five Holyrood elections UKIP have contested, they only got into the single-digit percentages once, in 2016. Even then they only won a paltry 2% of the vote, against some pre-election polls suggesting they could win seats. Their then-MEP David Coburn ended up fleeing his Highlands and Islands count before it concluded rather than stay to heard his failure confirmed.
With both parties on the ballot in 2021 but struggling for relevance, they won a smaller percentage of the vote than UKIP alone had won at its previous low point in 2007. Since then, or more accurately since mid-2024, Reform UK have experienced explosive growth, with some polls even breaking 20%. Since then they’ve begun to plateau and perhaps even begin to show signs of decreasing support, something I’ve said all along I expected to happen as the date approaches. Nonetheless they are currently on about 17-18% overall, a still remarkable share for a new entrant to Holyrood.
Reform UK (and UKIP) Seats Won at Scottish Parliament Elections
Obviously, the first six bars here are entirely given over to “Other MSPs”, which makes the size of the 2026 bar pretty remarkable. To be on track for 17 MSPs when they’ve never before won any is undeniably impressive, and would give them a significant role in Parliament. All bar one of these are currently expected to be list seats, though there are some potential other constituency wins depending on exactly how their vote is spread. (Note: this section was updated after publication to account for an error in the model, which after correction shows Banffshire and Buchan Coast as a Reform win.)
Reform UK List Vote Distribution by Region in 2024 (Estimate)
Given that Reform and UKIP won almost no votes in 2021, there’s very little use in showing even their joint performance from 2021. It spans a range from 0.29% to 0.46% of the vote, which is deeply unilluminating. Instead, I’m comparing with the 2024 UK General Election, grouping constituencies into rough approximations of Holyrood regions. “Rough” being the key term, as our multiplicity of voting systems means there is very little boundary consistency across different levels of government.
Whilst there aren’t huge differences in most regions, we can broadly slot these results into three different bands. The first would be the big city regions, centred on Edinburgh and Glasgow. Support for Reform is naturally weakest in the areas with the greatest number of young and ethnic minority residents.
The second band are areas pretty much in line with their national share, which was 7%. These are the Highlands and Islands, Mid Scotland and Fife, and West Scotland. These have a mixed electorate that includes some areas that are distinctly unfavourable to Reform but others which are pretty fertile ground.
The third and final band are the peak support regions: Central and Lothians West, North East and South. These regions all either have limited moderation from weakly Reform areas, or areas of such intense Reform strength that those are more than balanced out.
Key Areas
Given the lack of previous data to go on, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to figure out the areas most vital for Reform. One general point worth picking up though is the relative conservatism of the BBS model versus some other sources, such as Election Maps UK, Devolved Elections, and pollster Mark McGeoghegan. My model tends towards zero or one Reform constituency wins, whereas others can often expect a handful of such wins.
There are a couple of things driving this difference. One is that my model has always worked on the assumption that the Greens won’t contest any of the most likely strong Reform constituencies, and has redistributed their expected vote accordingly, which largely benefits the SNP. Even where both myself and another source were to agree on the Reform share in a seat, my model gave the SNP 2-4% more of a leg up than theirs.
The other is that I think they might be over-indexing the Reform vote to past Conservative support. Certainly, there is a very strong link between the two, hence the expectation that just like for the Conservatives, the North East and South will be Reform’s two best regions. However, as explored in this piece here, some of that vote is being filtered through having voted Labour in 2024. A lot of those voters are actually in the post-industrial Central Belt. Broadly speaking the kind of voters most likely to back Reform in Scotland include 2016 Brexiteers, post-industrial left-behinds and culture war obsessives.
That doesn’t map perfectly to the Conservatives’ historic base. For example, there’s absolutely no way in my view that Reform win Eastwood, despite it being one of the Conservatives’ existing constituency seats. That’s an affluent, socially liberal Davidsonian Conservative vote, not a Reform-favourable one. Likewise, I’m more dubious about the Borders and inland Aberdeenshire seats than my counterparts, because that kind of longstanding rural farming community vote, with a Lib Dem history, may prove reasonably resilient for the Conservatives.
To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of other people’s work, but rather a hypothesis of my own that will be tested in May! We’re all stumbling around in the same dark coming to slightly different conclusions, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Banffshire and Buchan Coast (Constituency)
Notional 2021 Constituency Vote
2026 Constituency Vote (Projected)
Banffshire and Buchan Coast is hands-down the best short that Reform UK have at gaining a constituency, and at time of publication the BBS model narrowly thinks they will win it. They did very well in the overlapping Westminster constituency in 2024, their 14% of the vote precisely double their national share. Given they are looking at more than double again the share nationwide, and add in that the prior version of the UK seat was estimated to be the only one in Scotland to have voted Leave, and this should be a very good seat for them.
The reason for this pattern of strength is simple: fishing. Peterhead is not simply Scotland or the UK’s largest fishing port, but the biggest in Europe. Nearby Fraserburgh is the fourth largest in the country. The downturns in this industry have shaped the local area, giving parts of both towns some of the worst poverty in Scotland and a deep dislike for the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. It’s perhaps no surprise that a massive surge in Conservative support in what was long an SNP heartland coincided with the Brexit vote, and now Reform are likely to benefit from local dissatisfaction with both parties.
Whisper it quietly, but basically every other party bar the SNP might be quite happy for Reform to pick this one up. Given the intense pressure the SNP’s expected constituency wins are putting on the proportionality in the North East, a Reform win here releases some of that. Only one party can pick up the resulting freed up list seat, of course, and it could be down to fine margins which of them it would be, but better for everyone else to have that extra breathing space than not.
Galloway and West Dumfries (Constituency)
2021 Constituency Vote
2026 Constituency Vote (Projected)
This constituency may lie at the opposite end of the Scottish mainland from the one above, but there are some striking similarities between the two. Stranraer subs in for Peterhead and Fraserburgh as a large town that has suffered a blow to its historic economic anchor, in this case the ferry port which shifted up the loch to Cairnryan.
It likewise has a strong fishing heritage (indeed, my dad’s side of the family hails from a fishing village in Galloway) and a general feeling of being left behind. It also has a history of being an SNP versus Conservative battleground, albeit only briefly in the pre-IndyRef era, when the SNP won the Galloway seat in both the 1997 UK and 1999 Scottish elections.
Throw in the fact this covers the first area in Scotland where Reform ever won the most votes (Stranraer and the Rhins) and this could be very fertile ground for them, albeit it’s hard to get the model to think that. It will be easier said than done to translate a lead of just 2% in one ward’s by-election into a constituency MSP, however. It’s unlikely the SNP will do as poorly as in that by-election, and they will potentially be bolstered by a sense of tactical urgency, plus the absence of the Greens from the constituency ballot this time.
The Conservatives are also unlikely to give the seat up without a fight, as shown by that Stranraer result. They narrowly held the equivalent seat in 2024 despite a halving of their national vote, and with Labour back on the downswing, local voters that are both anti-SNP and anti-Reform may consider them the safest option. From the perspective of the right wing parties, the biggest risk is that they split what is likely to be a majority for that side of the spectrum in such a way the SNP come through the middle.
Central Scotland and Lothians West (Region)
Notional 2021 Regional Vote
2026 Regional Vote (Projected)
Uniquely in this short list, Central Scotland and Lothians West is an overwhelmingly urban area. That is however where Reform have been drawing a lot of recent strength, specifically in the most working class areas. Notably, the one and only non-MEP seat that a Farage outfit has thus far won in Scotland (Whitburn and Blackburn) was within this region.
This should therefore be a region where Reform could be on track for 3 or even 4 MSPs on a good, were it not for the SNP’s proportionality busting constituency polling. The expectation right now is that the SNP would win all 9 constituencies, against a proportional entitlement of 6 MSPs, which traps Reform on 2. I expect Reform’s support to be relatively high but well spread, meaning they’d be reliant on Labour winning seats like Uddingston and Bellshill to try and relieve some of that proportional squash.Â
North East Scotland (Region)
2021 Regional Vote
2026 Regional Vote (Projected)
This is the region that contains Banffshire and Buchan Coast, which will contribute significantly to Reform’s support here. However, the rest of northern Aberdeenshire and also the north of Aberdeen City were also above average for Reform in 2024, as was the historic fishing town of Arbroath. That’s what made this the best bit of the country for Reform at that election, and why I expect them to repeat the feat this time around.Â
The big challenge for Reform here though is if they end up splitting the right wing vote against the SNP rather than winning many (if any) constituencies. With less than 30% of the vote, the SNP’s rightful share of seats in the region would be 5 MSPs, but they could win all 10 constituencies. That would absolutely ruin the proportionality, potentially costing Reform an MSP or two as a result. It’s not actually impossible that Reform take a regional vote lead yet still end up with a third of the SNP’s seats!
South Scotland (Region)
Notional 2021 Regional Vote
2026 Regional Vote (Projected)
The core of the Conservative’s 2016 revival, I expect the South to be good, but not as good, for Reform. It’s important to remember that for example Conservative strength in the Borders was built upon voters abandoning the Lib Dems, and a lot of those voters won’t exactly be itching to further defect to Reform.
Nonetheless, there is still plenty of potential here for Reform, especially in the Galloway and West Dumfries constituency mentioned above. The presence of quite a few post-industrial working class communities, in for example the mining towns and villages across the Ayrshire coalfields, will also play very much in Reform’s favour.Â
Unlike the other two regions, the SNP are much less likely to win every constituency in this region. They’ll still stretch proportionality, but with the core Borders seat especially expected to remain in Conservative hands, Reform and other parties can anticipate a little bit more wriggle room to get more of the list seats they are fairly due.
What to Watch for in 2026
Note: Obviously, your personal perception of a good or bad result will depend on how much you like a given party. For the purposes of this piece, good and bad relate to how an impartial observer might view the result, taking into account other elections and the general situation facing that party. They are not a commentary on whether such results would be good or bad for the country.
Good Result
Winning seats for the first time will be seen as pretty good for Reform regardless of how many, but given the weight of expectation a truly good result needs to be something special. Placing second would do the trick, as would winning 20 or more seats. They do however need to place comfortably second in order to be sure of retaining that status for any length of time.
If they are tied or only a couple of seats clear of the third placed party, the defections and expulsions inherent to Farageite outfits will soon rob them of second party status: emphasis on “second party”, as the Scottish Parliament does not have an “Official Opposition”, a concept ill-suited to a proportionally elected parliament.
Bad Result
Given their 2021 starting position of zero seats, you could reasonably argue there’s no truly bad result for Reform. “Relatively bad” however would be falling short of where polling has placed them. If they not only fail to place second but do so by more than one or two MSPs, that wouldn’t meet the expectations set by polling over winter. I’d say anything below 15 would be a disappointment in relative terms.
I’ve been consistent in saying I think their support will drop by May, and polling seems to be bearing that out, with average support slipping slightly to levels last seen in October. The big issue for Reform is that there is no prospect whatsoever of them forming a government, whereas even a badly bruised Labour party could count on more support from other parties. Recognising this as a potential change of government election then, some anti-SNP voters that were flirting with Reform could therefore default to Labour as a safer option.
In addition, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Reform have gotten high on their own supply. Buoyed by their polling and (like so much of our politics and media sphere) completely rotting their brains on the Website Formerly Known as Twitter, they have been putting forward ideas and candidates more extreme than they can really get away with. You only need to look at their furious, conspiratorial reaction to losing in Gorton and Denton to see that.Â
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