Until I looked the constituency majorities together for the 2019 and 2024 General Elections, I hadn’t spotted that the sweet spot for Alliance is a shade under three thousand votes for their wins at both elections.
Two versions of the chart: one in order of increasing majority at GE2019, the other in order of increasing majority at GE2024. I find my eye catches different details and looks for different stories depending on whether the focus is on the old or the new state.
Sinn Féin increased their majority in every seat they held, despite the lower turnout.
In 2019, Sinn Féin had three of the lowest five majorities. In 2024, there were no nationalist seats in the bottom five (though SF was only 179 votes shy of a narrow East Londonderry win).
Fermanagh & South Tyrone is still the party’s most marginal constituency (4,571), but it’s now not far off the middle of the table, and has a larger majority than the SDLP have in Foyle (4,166).
Coming out of last week’s election, Sinn Féin’s majority in South Down was more than five and a half times the size it was going in … throwing a large question over the excited chatter at count centres last Thursday night/Friday morning about “South Down is in play”. Nearly as silly as the sleep-deprived talk about the UUP being ahead in Fermanagh & South Tyrone!
When I get a couple of hours, I’ll update my spreadsheet – definitely before the next General Election! – to give TUV a colour and move it out of the ‘Others and Independents’ catch-all category!
Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.
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