Scottish Parliament Election, 6th May 2021

[bore]

Lib Dems hold Shetland on a 19 point swing to the SNP.

And then on the other side of the coin Rennie won East Fife with a large personal vote that consolidated the unionist behind him.

Wow, Methil is not a place you'd expect the lib dems to do well in.

As a North East Fife voter, I have to tell you that Methil is actually just over the constituency border in the Kirkcaldy constituency.

If Methil was in the seat, we'd be as safe SNP as Glasgow Kelvin.

Its worth reading Oryxslayer's post very carefully, and then thinking about Methil's football team...

[Torrain]

Lib Dems hold Shetland on a 19 point swing to the SNP.

And then on the other side of the coin Rennie won East Fife with a large personal vote that consolidated the unionist behind him.

Wow, Methil is not a place you'd expect the lib dems to do well in.

As a North East Fife voter, I have to tell you that Methil is actually just over the constituency border in the Kirkcaldy constituency.

If Methil was in the seat, we'd be as safe SNP as Glasgow Kelvin.

Its worth reading Oryxslayer's post very carefully, and then thinking about Methil's football team...

Ah. The East Fife team.

Apologies, my football knowledge is about as poor as my attempts to play the game. Even though they’re technically our local team, I’ve never heard them mentioned. At school, anyone one had an interest in the game was either bought into one of the Old Firm teams, or the Premier League.

[IceAgeComing]

The question of whether a 'mandate' exists for manifesto commitments is silly I think. The SNP and the Greens (along with the Alba party but they got no seats so are irrelevant) both stood on a clear position that they support a second referendum and collectively they have a majority in Parliament to pass a bill for one which is all the mandate you need for something. Especially for a referendum where the key question is one where you are seeking a mandate directly from the electorate anyway. The electorate knew who they were voting for when they voted after all.

Fwiw, electoralcalculus always has the western bit of Caithness and Sutherland (Lairg, Lochinver) as more Lib Dem than the seat as a whole.

Electoral Calculus numbers are voodoo maths even when they have a solid set of local elections to base them on: in the Highlands where every local election is almost exclusively Independents with a few SNP and Green candidates standing in scattered wards it is even more so since they can't use local election results to test their hunches in the same way.

[Beezer]

Is anybody aware of a good post-election analysis? Been looking for one and the reasons Covid and the botched vaccine rollout in the EU may have played in the SNP doing somewhat worse than expected (at least compared to their polling #s last fall).