A Finger in the Wind

Gwern Gwynfil

Most people still don’t get the new system for the Senedd election on Thursday.

Historically, fewer than half of registered Cymru voters cast their ballots in Senedd elections. Many thousands of eligible voters still remain unregistered (something which should be addressed by automatic voter registration in the future).

On a population basis, turnout in Assembly, and now Senedd, elections, equates to about 1 in 3 of the population of Cymru choosing our leaders and leadership for each Senedd term.

It has been widely discussed that in this election the final list seat in each constituency could be allocated on the slimmest of margins. This is true but for those who truly wish to grasp the nuances of this, read this blog by Jac Larner of the Welsh Governance Centre, it is excellent.

A few hundred votes could make all the difference in any given constituency.

In the final analysis, across Cymru, that potentially equates to some thousands of votes, out of over a million in total, having a big impact on final allocations for a sixth of the available Senedd seats.

For those with longer memories, consider the 1997 ballot to establish the Welsh Assembly in the first place, where the Caerfyrddin result tipped things from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’ by a final margin of just under seven thousand ballots.

On a Cymru wide basis a similar number of votes, distributed appropriately, could result in a very different ideological partition to the next Senedd. If you know of anyone who says their vote doesn’t matter, it really does.

A party’s actual seat tally is influenced not just by the number of votes it receives but by the total number of votes and the way they are distributed across other parties.

A few percentage points, a different pattern of votes for other parties, or both, can relatively easily move the outcome of a seat.

There are a lot of moving parts.

Showing up matters

Traditionally, women and younger voters are less likely to vote (younger voters being those under the age of 45, with fewer and fewer showing up as a proportion of their own age group the younger we go). Over 65s are the most likely to vote.

These are broad generalisations, albeit backed by a lot of data, but there are always those in every age group that do not match the views and behaviours of the plurality!

Polling Data

 It may feel as if we’ve had lots of polls for this election in Cymru, but  we are relatively poorly served with data. There is little consistency and continuity across the data sets we do have, making it harder to forecast outcomes with any degree of accuracy. Coupled with the nature of the new electoral system this is a tough election to call.

But there are still clear conclusions to take from the data we do have available.

On a demographic basis, broadly speaking, significantly more older voters favour the right wing parties, Reform UK and Conservatives, whilst voters become increasingly progressive the younger they become – to the point that the very youngest voters (16-24) see barely 1 in 10 supporting the right wing parties in some data.

There are also trends across gender, perceived self identity, and language.

In party political terms, it is almost certain that Plaid Cymru and Reform UK will top the polls in first and second place. Labour trails in a poor third place, but may be bumped to fourth by the surging Green Party, which very clearly has considerable momentum.

The Conservatives will most likely be a poor fifth, and the miserable Welsh Liberal Democrats will barely feature. The various small parties and community candidates will impact constituency seat calculations but it is very difficult to see any of them winning a seat anywhere.

My own conclusion from all of this is that a low turnout, matching the expected demographic turnout pattern to which we have become accustomed in elections, will favour Reform UK and deliver a very close race between them and Plaid Cymru (as widely predicted by many pollsters).

A Guessing Game

 I don’t think this will be the case.

For many of the pollsters they are not only dealing with a new electoral system but doing so in a country which does not quite match the foundation data and background from which they’ve built their methodologies and models, and where they have little prior experience.

This is no criticism of their abilities or collection of raw data. They are simply hampered by having developed an analytical approach based on UK wide practice and learnings and without the kind of historic data they would need to strengthen analysis in a Cymru context.

Few pollsters have deep and consistent data sets for Cymru, hardly any have in-house Cymru expertise and they only sporadically add this externally to their modelling.

With the exception of YouGov, with its long relationship with the Welsh Governance Centre, more consistent polling and experimentation with modelling for Cymru, the various polls have to be understood as measures of those wide trends that can help us paint a broad brush picture of the state of political support in Cymru. Even YouGov data is not always collected and collated using the same approaches.

Beyond the headline positions this means that predicting the outcome of the Senedd election on 7th May is almost impossible – uncertainty amplified by an added relatively high trend of undecided voters in the data. This matters a lot where small swings can make a big difference to ultimate seat allocations.

Seeing the flow

 With all of this in mind, I’ll still dive in and give my thoughts on the flow of the data and how I think the dice will fall.

In doing so I am choosing to put my faith in the women and younger generations across Cymru, whom I believe will show up and vote in numbers. I hope and believe that turnout will be over 50% for the first time ever in a Senedd election.

Given how historically low turnout was in the last General Election in Wales, at 56%, this will be a huge trend shift in democratic engagement at a Senedd election level.

This high turnout will deliver a thumping victory for Plaid Cymru, perhaps as high as 40% of the popular vote, a proportion that could even deliver a working majority (based on the polls this is a stretch, but I would still class this as unlikely but possible). Reform UK will do well, they have come from nowhere and 20+ seats is a huge result, but it will still be a loss in their own terms having set the bar so high for themselves.

This reflects the same reality in the Caerffili by-election at the end of last year. Plaid won comfortably in a predicted tight race, leaving Reform UK to slink away with their tail between their legs, having not only presumed that victory was in the bag but counted their chickens long before they hatched.

What of the other parties

Labour will have a terrible night. Electoral logic dictates that, for Labour supporters in a Plaid/Reform contest, giving their vote to Plaid Cymru as the party best placed to beat Reform makes sense. Data suggests that historic, even lifelong, Labour voters will be doing this in large numbers.

We forget that, even though many people don’t have a grasp of the details of the new system, they are not unsophisticated. With data showing that over 60% of the electorate are firmly against Reform UK, we should not be too surprised to see the kind of tactical voting which has become very common in first past the post contests.

The Greens will have a good night. Their goal, just months ago, was to win one seat. They will win many more. Across Cymru they are flirting with the vote proportion threshold which virtually guarantees a seat in any given constituency.

In Caerdydd Penarth, where Anthony Slaughter, the Green Party leader in Cymru, already has a very substantial personal vote, it will not be a surprise to see them pick up a second seat. They could land anything from 5-17 seats. Regardless of political affiliation, for election watchers, this level of uncertainty is an exciting prospect. More women voters and more young voters disproportionately favours the Green Party, even more so than Plaid Cymru.

The same high turnout from younger demographics could push the Conservatives and Liberals collectively to a mere handful of seats. Some modelling puts both parties very close to total wipeout.

I do expect the Conservatives to scrape a small number of seats, it is possible that the Liberals will have a presence in the Senedd, but equally conceivable that they will disappear completely from this level of government in Cymru. There is a good chance that neither party will reach the threshold required (5 seats) to be recognised as a group within the Senedd.

A Nervous Wait – Ar Bigau’r Draen

Come Friday evening we will all know the result. Whether or not the above is accurate, one thing we know is that the political composition of the Senedd will be wildly different to anything seen since the advent of devolution in 1999. Cymru is at a crossroads. Which road will we choose?

Brace yourselves. Make sure you vote.