General Election 2017: The Scottish Constituencies

11 Jun 2017

From the archive — published in 2017 on the original Chokkablog, kept as it was written.

• The "unionist" parties (Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems) had a 62.4 % overall vote share and greater than a 50% vote share in every constituency in Scotland


• The SNP's 36.9% share in Scotland was lower than Labour's 40.0% vote share across the UK -- but won them 59% of seats


• With 27% of the vote, Labour won just 12% of seats; the Conservatives with 29% of the vote won 22% of seats, the Lib Dems with 7% of vote won 7% of seats


• The Scottish Conservatives received just a 1.5% higher vote share than Scottish Labour by dint of getting 5.7% more votes [757k vs 717k]


• Scottish Labour were second in 24 constituencies, Conservatives in 10 and Lib Dems in 1 (by just 2 votes)


• The SNP came second in every seat they lost


• There were four constituencies with winning margins of less than 100 votes -- these were all won by the SNP


• Across the 6 constituencies which the SNP won with the lowest margin of victory, they cumulatively won by just 619 votes (or an average of 102 votes per constituency) -- a swing of just 310 votes nationwide would have seen the SNP lose their claim to a majority of Scottish seats at Westminster


• The lowest winning constituency vote share was the SNP's 32.6% in Lanark & Hamilton East where the Tories polled 32.1%, Labour 31.9%


• The largest winning margin was comfortably Labour's Ian Murray's 15,514 majority in Edinburgh South; with a 54.9% vote share he was 32.4% ahead of  the SNP who polled just 22.5%


• The only other constituency won with a majority vote share was the Scottish Conservative's John Lamont who won Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk with 53.9% of the vote, a majority of 11,060 over the SNP who polled 32.8%


• The SNP's Vote share dropped from 50.0% in 2015 to 36.9% in 2017; their total votes dropped by a third [from 1,454,436 to 977,569]

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