Edinburgh Council Wild Card #1 : The Tory Transfer

Who the hell knows where this election will lead? I may have plumped for Edinburgh Labour to edge the Nats but no one beyond the red partisans agrees.

Nonetheless if Labour, or indeed any other party, are to become the largest group in the City Chambers there are several wild card factors at play. I’ve done the geeking so you don’t have to my activist chums. Here’s the first:

Consider if you will the Tory transfer. The Conservatives being the equivalent of political Millwall up here (“No one likes us and we don’t care”) don’t hugely benefit from vote transfers themselves. Generally their candidate has to thump through the swirling mass of leftist parties and secure election in the first round. If they don’t they have an agonising wait as others catch up with transfers as their vote crawls along, hoping for a few spare votes to bring them over the finish line. It must be frustating.

However in many wards the Tory vote whilst not bearing enough critical mass to guarantee election, is weighty enough to determine who else gets elected. Wards like Sighthill/Gorgie, Leith Walk and Portobello/Craigmillar where their first preference vote in 2007 ranged from 1,041-1,180.

So who do Tory voters put as a second preference? If you take the results of where they and they alone were elected in the first round in 2007 (Almond, Corstorphine, Fountainbridge and Meadows/Morningside) it’s easy enough to determine and it’s a big enough sample size for this not to be complete navel gazing bollocks.

Here’s the results:

So not surprisingly the Lib Dems are by far and away the main beneficiary of the Tory transfer. Indeed this transfer put Marilyn MacLaren over the finishing line in 2007 and may yet save Jenny Dawe who having a well-founded fear of political persecution in Drum Brae is seeking asylum in Meadows and Morningside this time round. For the Liberal Democrats who are facing a collapse in vote it is almost as worth canvassing Conservative voters who have less reason to punish the yellows than supporters of the other three as it is their own.

But the great quirk in these little statistics is the slight preference that Tory leaning voters give to the Greens over the twin enemies of the SNP/Labour. As this is an average it is by no means repeated across all the wards of Edinburgh but Conservative transfers did deliver Maggie Chapman for the Greens in Leith Walk whilst transfers to Labour were evenly split between their two candidates.

The great imponderable however is the looming 40% of Conservative voters who expressed no 2nd preference. And if the Lib Dems are knocked out early persuading Tories that your party is the lesser of the three evils and worth their 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th preference could be the crucial difference come May.