We’ve written a number of extremely, painstakingly detailed articles in the last few months explaining why list votes for the SNP at next year’s election will be wasted, and will serve only to elect Unionist (and in particular Reform) MSPs.
Unfortunately, some people still don’t get it.
And that’s understandable, because super-detailed articles are long and people have terribly short attention spans nowadays, especially if there are large tranches of fiddly arithmetic involved. So let’s go the opposite way.
Here’s the latest poll. Constituency vote is on the left of each coloured pair of bars, list vote on the right.
We’re not interested in the constituency polling here (except for how it’ll impact seats, which we’ll get to in a second), so here it is with the list-vote figures alone.
And here’s the seat projection as calculated by Sir John Curtice, where the SNP win 57 constituencies because they have a 14-point lead over their nearest rivals in the constituency vote, which works under First Past The Post.
That’s just over seven constituency seats per region (there are eight regions), so the SNP’s list vote gets divided by eight (7+1) at the count. So when it comes to allocating list seats, the actual vote shares are approximately these:
Clear enough?
– The Tory list vote is 3.5 times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get three list seats in a region before the SNP got one.
– The Labour list vote is almost five times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get four list seats in a region before the SNP got one.
– The Lib Dem list vote is almost three times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get two list seats in a region before the SNP got one.
– The Green list vote is almost five times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get four list seats in a region before the SNP got one.
– The Reform list vote is over five times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get five list seats in a region before the SNP got one.
– The Alba list vote is 1.5 times higher than the SNP’s, so they’d get a list seat in a region before the SNP did.
That means that when it came to allocating the list seats in any given region, the SNP would be in TWENTIETH place, behind five Reform candidates, four Labour ones, four Green ones, three Tories, two Lib Dems and an Alba). But since there are only seven list seats per region, what you’d actually get would be, in order:
1st seat: Reform
2nd: Labour
3rd: Green
4th: Tory
5th: Lib Dem
6th: Reform
7th: Labour
Now, we’ve been generalising here because in reality the votes and constituency seats won’t be split absolutely equally in each region (and also because we think the poll seriously overstates the Green vote, as Holyrood polling historically does and because this particular poll had a slightly oddly-worded question), but it doesn’t matter because as you can see, the wiggle room is the size of a galaxy.
(So even if, say, the Lib Dems picked up a couple of constituency seats in Highland, which they will, taking them out of the running for a list seat there, there are a dozen Unionists in the queue behind them before the SNP would get a look-in as a result.)
If Jeremy Corbyn’s new party ever becomes a reality (something which looks less likely by the day as it dissolves in acrimony) it might damage Labour and the Greens a bit, but would make no meaningful difference to anything else.
On these figures the SNP aren’t coming within a hundred thousand miles of a list seat. Every single list vote cast for them will count for nothing. Scores of gleeful Unionists will troop into Holyrood sniggering at SNP voters’ stupidity.
Three brightly-coloured bar graphs. If anyone still doesn’t get it, they’re beyond help.
