AE22b battleground seats

 With another Assembly election on the way, and not much seeming to change in polling, are there any seats that are likely change hands? Here I have looked at May’s results and found the seats that were won by a relatively small margin.

 

Foyle

 

The DUP finished fewer than 100 votes ahead of the UUP after the final stage of the count in Foyle. The UUP have a chance to win this seat by convincing nationalist and non-aligned voters to transfer to them ahead of the DUP. The DUP did attract pro-life transfers from Aontú and won the majority of TUV transfers last time around. 

 

Strangford

 

Alliance won the final seat in Strangford by 249 votes. The TUV’s Stephen Cooper actually came third on first preference votes but Alliance scooped up transfers from all over and, crucially, from the eliminated nationalist candidate’s voters. The DUP will probably field two candidates here in December and that may help the TUV by having one round fewer of Unionist transfers to be diluted. 

 

East Londonderry

 

In the penultimate stage of the count in East Londonderry, Alliance were eliminated trailing the SDLP by just 15.2 votes. Cara Hunter of the SDLP went on to win the seat. East Londonderry will be top of the targets list for both Alliance and Sinn Féin with seat five being a three way battle. 

 

Upper Bann

 

Alliance finished 386 votes ahead of Sinn Féin after 8 stages of counting. Interestingly John O’Dowd had a surplus of 795 votes after stage 7 and of those, 64 were non transferrable and 267 actually went to Alliance. Had all the Sinn Féin votes transferred to Liam Mackle then he would have won the seat. This situation never happens though and even with a more favourable transfer rate Tennyson would have benefitted from the small UUP surplus. It is worth noting that SDLP transfers favoured Alliance, those 267 votes likely transferred to O’Dowd from other candidates. Sinn Féin won the most first preference votes in Upper Bann and yet only won 1 seat while the DUP won 2. Upper Bann will be Sinn Féin prime target this time around.

 

North Antrim

 

Alliance won the final seat in North Antrim by 288.4 votes. In the end the DUP just did not have enough votes to win two seats here unless transfers disappeared at a large rate. Alliance won many of the nationalist transfers and eventually pulled ahead of Mervyn Storey. The seat is vulnerable though, Alliance only polled 9.5% of first preference votes and Unionism has 4 quotas in North Antrim. This will be the DUP’s top target. 

 

 

Others

 

While these are the closest battles from May there are a few other seats worth keeping an eye on. Sinn Féin may try for a third seat in South Down but this will be difficult. Unionism is far above a quota which will ensure Alliance keep their seat and the SDLP were within touching distance of a quota. 

 

The DUP, as ever, will compete for West Belfast and as few as 400 additional Unionist votes (which stay within unionism) might win them that seat at the expense of People Before Profit. 

 

The Greens are not too far behind Alliance in South Belfast but will need to finish ahead of one of the Alliance candidates on first preferences to have a chance at regaining that seat. 

 

The UUP finished ahead of Alliance on first preference votes in East Antrim and yet Alliance won 2 seats to the UUP’s 1. The UUP will need to attract more non-voters, win over some Alliance voters, and balance their candidates ahead of the Alliance candidates to win this back. Even with that it will be a tall order with nationalism having 12.1% of the vote to transfer. 

 

Unionism has 31.7% of the vote in Newry & Armagh. This is just 2% shy of a second quota. A Unionist gain here is a possibility, but very unlikely. 

 

 

I will look at each party’s key targets in detail in a different post. 

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