2014 Euro Elections: The power of three?

At this weekend's Spring Conference, the SNP picked its slate of six European candidates from fifteen who have been husting across the country, making the case for their candidacy, over the last few weeks.  The remaining six will be ranked by the party membership on a one-member-one-vote basis over the summer. The two incumbent MEPs, Alyn Smith and Ian Hudghton, survived the Conference's verdict, along with Toni Giugliano, Chris Stephens, former Salmond special advisor Stephen Gethins and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who counts the SNP as her third party in as many years, formerly having held memberships of both the Tory and Labour Parties.  

From the conference scuttlebutt, it seems that the leadership were quite keen to see Tasmina prosper this weekend.  Just an unlikely coincidence I'm sure, just serendipity, that Ahmed-Sheikh's daughter was hailed as the SNP's 25,000th member on the eve of the conference. Subtle it ain't, but I suppose such machinations are to be expected in all political outfits, where happy accidents can be found to puff the objects of official favour. It remains to be seen where the party membership will bestow their benevolence.  Those candidates nominated in first and second place, all things being equal, are assured a seat in the European Parliament.  Interestingly, if the current polls are anything to go by, the SNP has a sniff of a third.

How European Elections Work

I find that many folk are a bit mystified by how European elections work. Here's a brief summary. Firstly, Scotland is a single constituency, and from 2009 onwards, elects six MEPs.  These are selected on the basis of a simple quota system.  Like the regional vote in Holyrood, each party nominates and ranks a list of candidates. On election night, returning officers tot up all of the votes cast into national totals.

These are then divided by the number of seats the party has already won in the region + 1, with the party with the highest tally winning a candidate in that round.  In practice, that means that the party winning the highest level of support takes the first MEP, and their vote is divided first by two, and then by three if they take a second seat.  Clear as mud?  Consider this worked example. Consider the allocation in 2009.

As you can see, the Greens never really had a look in here, the scrap for the sixth and last Scottish MEP being duked out between Labour and the SNP, with only 7,925 votes between them, and the Tories due a second MEP too before any Scottish Green got to set foot in Brussels.

With the fundament falling through the Liberal vote after 2010, both the SNP and the Greens - and the Tories too - smell an opportunity for gains, and they're right to do so.  Projecting ahead here is a little tricky. The constituency which turns out for European elections isn't the same as materialises for Holyrood and Westminster polls, and accordingly, neither are good guides to what levels of support parties might expect in 2014, save in general terms about who is up, and who is down.

The drift of the Liberal vote also poses its predictive challenges. The Scottish election survey has convincingly shown that the SNP's win in the Holyrood election of 2011 wasn't attributable to the direct transfer of drifting Liberal Democrats, but an ensemble piece, pulled together from the electorate which had previously supported all of the SNP's rivals. No Scottish poll has yet asked about voting intentions for Europe.

For mischief, however, let's be crude about it, and candid about our crude assumptions. Say, for the sake of argument, that the number of votes cast in 2014 are the same as 2009. Let's assume too that the SNP, still doing well in the polls in Holyrood, add another 5% to their 2009 showing of 29.1% of the European vote, taking them up to 34.1% of all ballots cast.  For the model, say too that Labour, the Tories and the Greens are steady at 20.8%, 16.8% and 7.8% of the vote respectively.  Now let's snaffle 5% off the Liberal Democrats, leaving them with just 6.5% of Euro ballots cast.  

Given what we know about recent local and Holyrood elections, these assumptions don't seem entirely unreasonable. If the 2014 European elections were to pan out along these lines, who might benefit from George Lyon's evaporating vote? The tantalising answer is: it's all up for grabs.

SNP gains and Liberal losses reorders rounds one to five, with the Conservatives gaining their first MEP in the fourth rather than the third round, while the SNP snares its second in round three instead of four, per 2009. Instead of being narrowly trumped handily by the Labour Party in the sixth round, a 5% bump in support combined with a -5% Liberal slump would put the third-ranked SNP candidate very much in contention much earlier on, due an office in Strasbourg and Brussels as early as round five. An opportunity here which clearly focussed minds in the party conference in Inverness this weekend, and promises to make the ranking contest between Smith, Hudghton, Giugliano, Stephens, Gethins and Ahmed-Sheikh quite the scrap. 

On these simple assumptions, round six of the allocation doesn't have the appearance of a closely-fought mêlée, though reality has the habit of upending one's most cogent assumptions.  On this model, Labour would retain its second MEP in the sixth round, 18,796 votes ahead of the nearest contender - now the fourth-ranked SNP candidate - and 34,485 in front of the Greens. 

While in Holyrood in 2011, the Scottish Greens proved unable to capitalise on the Liberal purge, perhaps Europe will give Maggie Chapman an opportunity to corral more wayward Liberals, shorn of the presidential Salmond vs Gray logic which dominated in 2011.  If she's to have a snowball's chance in hell to be in contention, she'll have to push the Green vote (higher in European elections in recent years than in Holyrood polls) to the sorts of levels which the Liberals were able to command in the pre-coalition era.

A rather modest opportunity here too for the Scottish Conservatives to achieve that most elusive of outcomes - a Scottish political gain - if only they can keep up their vote. And, for that matter, for the Liberal Democrats to save a little face, if their losses aren't as attenuating as I've projected. Lyon might survive yet.  

UPDATE

In an earlier edition of the blog, I magisterially cocked up the all important last-stage calculation (unaccountably, I mixed up my dividers) hence any changes you might detect in the charts or their interpretation.