OTL Election maps resources thread

Utgard96 · May 10, 2015

Interesting how UKIP seems to have almost seamlessly displaced the Labour vote. Terrifying, but interesting.

Thande · May 10, 2015

Ares96 said:
Interesting how UKIP seems to have almost seamlessly displaced the Labour vote. Terrifying, but interesting.

It's more complex than that when you drill down to the percentages, Labour still had a reasonable voteshare, but that is what it looks like from a purely geographic perspective.

Thande · May 11, 2015

Rotherham is updated. There was a lot of speculation because UKIP broke through big time here in 2014 and the council is still wracked with scandal (their child sexual abuse inquiry link takes up more space on their council website frontpage than the link to the election results). However, here national Labour did not take the threat lying down. Realising their local party could not find their backsides with both hands, they basically shut them down and sent in the troops from elsewhere. I get the impression they also engineered the retirements of a lot of sitting councillors associated with the current regime. The result was that this combined with the general election turnout meant that UKIP only won three seats this time, and tellingly two of them were in usual Tory areas--the Tories obviously weren't putting the same effort into campaigning in the district. Labour's efforts were rewarded with majorities that actually increased slightly from 2010 in the parliamentary constituencies (except Rotherham proper which went down slightly) and a lot of narrow holds in the council clearly born of carefully judged campaigning. Comparisons to Scotland are obvious and while it's a wee bit bigger than Rotherham and the problems were longer-term and needed tackling earlier, this kind of approach might have paid dividends north of the border. My impression is that a lot of this has been driven by Sarah Champion, the parachuted MP who won the by-election in 2012 (which first triggered UKIP's rise in the area when they came second to her) and has been working to tackle the scandal ever since it came into the public view.

I don't know if there will be boundary changes but Rotherham is supposed to have an all-up election in 2016 because of the scandal (as mandated by Eric Pickles before he lost his job today) so that will be one to watch.

area11 · May 12, 2015

Thande said:
Rotherham is updated. There was a lot of speculation because UKIP broke through big time here in 2014 and the council is still wracked with scandal (their child sexual abuse inquiry link takes up more space on their council website frontpage than the link to the election results). However, here national Labour did not take the threat lying down. Realising their local party could not find their backsides with both hands, they basically shut them down and sent in the troops from elsewhere. I get the impression they also engineered the retirements of a lot of sitting councillors associated with the current regime. The result was that this combined with the general election turnout meant that UKIP only won three seats this time, and tellingly two of them were in usual Tory areas--the Tories obviously weren't putting the same effort into campaigning in the district. Labour's efforts were rewarded with majorities that actually increased slightly from 2010 in the parliamentary constituencies (except Rotherham proper which went down slightly) and a lot of narrow holds in the council clearly born of carefully judged campaigning. Comparisons to Scotland are obvious and while it's a wee bit bigger than Rotherham and the problems were longer-term and needed tackling earlier, this kind of approach might have paid dividends north of the border. My impression is that a lot of this has been driven by Sarah Champion, the parachuted MP who won the by-election in 2012 (which first triggered UKIP's rise in the area when they came second to her) and has been working to tackle the scandal ever since it came into the public view.

I don't know if there will be boundary changes but Rotherham is supposed to have an all-up election in 2016 because of the scandal (as mandated by Eric Pickles before he lost his job today) so that will be one to watch.

It's interesting that the two wards the BNP won in 2008 were some of the few not to fall to UKIP in 2014.

Thande · May 12, 2015

area11 said:
It's interesting that the two wards the BNP won in 2008 were some of the few not to fall to UKIP in 2014.

Indeed, I don't know if it's different demographics (I think Rotherham UKIP are more middle-class in character than in some parts of the country) or just because Labour put more effort into those wards to get the BNP out in the 2000s and that meant they held against UKIP.

Now here's something I made because of a discussion in the politics thread: Labour losses in Scotland by raw vote rather than percentage voteshare - in order to illustrate whether a Labour loss to the SNP in a given seat was primarily due to Labour losing votes or just being swamped by an increased turnout and previous non voters voting SNP.

Utgard96 · May 12, 2015

Seeing that next to a map of Labour majorities in 2010 would be really interesting.

Arsonist · May 12, 2015

Seeing as I was messing around with the Cheshire West and Chester council results anyway, have a updated map. Interesting to see that Labour grabbing a few wards in Chester was just enough to grab the council 38-36-1 and there not looking like many more wards that they could feasibly gain.

Thande · May 12, 2015

Arsonist said:
Seeing as I was messing around with the Cheshire West and Chester council results anyway, have a updated map. Interesting to see that Labour grabbing a few wards in Chester was just enough to grab the council 38-36-1 and there not looking like many more wards that they could feasibly gain.

Thanks for the update. As you say, absent a Blair-type event that probably represents a maxing out of Labour wards in the area.

Arsonist · May 12, 2015

Thande said:
Thanks for the update. As you say, absent a Blair-type event that probably represents a maxing out of Labour wards in the area.

Was surprised that Upton (the one to the north side of Chester) split, but the now-Labour councillor was heavily involved in anti-fracking protests so I imagine that helped quite a bit. It's not what you would call a traditionally-labour voting area.

Thande · May 12, 2015

Arsonist said:
Was surprised that Upton (the one to the north side of Chester) split, but the now-Labour councillor was heavily involved in anti-fracking protests so I imagine that helped quite a bit. It's not what you would call a traditionally-labour voting area.

Multi-member wards with noticeable splits usually tell you something interesting about either the candidates or the voters in the area (or both).

Alex Richards · May 12, 2015

I'd noticed that Labour had put in a good campaign there- they gained City of Chester constituency as well.

Thande · May 12, 2015

Alex Richards said:
I'd noticed that Labour had put in a good campaign there- they gained City of Chester constituency as well.

I missed that at the time. Gained by 93 votes! The Tories should have got Gyles Brandreth to stand again, clearly ;0

Thande · May 13, 2015

Another Scottish map. This compares the referendum vote from 2014 with the consolidated nationalist (SNP+Green+SSP) and unionist (Con+Lab+LD+UKIP) votes from the general election.* As you can see, the SNP reached the tipping point this election at which FPTP produces a near wipeout but this doesn't necessarily reflect the underlying results (though the consolidated Nationalists would still have a 3% lead across Scotland and more seats)

*I missed out minor parties as I don't know all of their positions on Scottish independence and it only came to 10,000 votes in total anyway.

OwenM · May 13, 2015

Thande said:
Multi-member wards with noticeable splits usually tell you something interesting about either the candidates or the voters in the area (or both).

There's one ward in my county that once had a four-way split elected in one go.

Thande · May 13, 2015

OwenM said:
There's one ward in my county that once had a four-way split elected in one go.

Does Wales still have more than three-member wards or was this a while ago?

(Don't mention New Hampshire's madness...)

Alex Richards · May 13, 2015

Right, as I've now finished Enterprise Episode 4 [/Shameless Plug], I've also updated the Erewash map. The 2015 election map is a bit more difficult to fit in to this more narrow format, so what do people think about that?

As for the results itself, the Conservatives increased their majority on the new seats, picking up a couple of extra seats in Ilkeston (the Hallam fields may be partially from UKIP vote splitting) and sweeping through the more prosperous parts of Long Eaton. A combination of the general election turnout and the UKIP surge mean that in general the majorities were much smaller this year compared to 2011.

As every seat had Conservative, Labour and UKIP candidates, and Erewash is a key marginal in the area, I've also done a comparison of Turnout by ward and party voteshare. While caveats obviously apply in terms of how much the council votes match the constituency results, if this is at all indicative it shows a rather concerning pattern for Labour- there is a very strong correlation between the Conservative voteshare and the overall turnout by ward, and while the Labour voteshare/turnout correlation is slightly weaker I think a lot of this is due to the impact of UKIP- Hallam Fields was almost a three-way marginal. Considering that the difference in turnout between Cotmanhay (56.9%) and my own Breaston (75.9%) is a staggering 19%, I can't help but think that the biggest reason why Labour failed to take the seat was due to their voters staying home.

Thande · May 13, 2015

Alex Richards said:
Right, as I've now finished Enterprise Episode 4 [/Shameless Plug], I've also updated the Erewash map. The 2015 election map is a bit more difficult to fit in to this more narrow format, so what do people think about that?

Good work on that Alex, you've done well to squeeze the 2015 map in - in some cases we may have to just do a very small one with any changes to the MPs added in with lines pointing to it.

Also I was going to do a popular voteshares one for Doncaster and Sheffield

If it's OK I'll nick your format. Maybe compare Doncaster to the last all-ups in 2004.

Alex Richards · May 13, 2015

Thande said:
Good work on that Alex, you've done well to squeeze the 2015 map in - in some cases we may have to just do a very small one with any changes to the MPs added in with lines pointing to it.

Also I was going to do a popular voteshares one for Doncaster and Sheffield If it's OK I'll nick your format. Maybe compare Doncaster to the last all-ups in 2004.

Yeah, it'll be tight in places. And that would be interesting to see.

Thande · May 13, 2015

Alex Richards said:
Yeah, it'll be tight in places. And that would be interesting to see.

In some cases the coat of arms could be put in the middle of the 4 maps perhaps instead to make space for 2015.

Alex Richards · May 13, 2015

Thande said:
In some cases the coat of arms could be put in the middle of the 4 maps perhaps instead to make space for 2015.

It's the ones like South Norfolk where the map's already so big/long that I've had to stack them on top of eachother that I'm more worried about.