Mapping General Election 2024
There are two different party systems in England, two in Scotland and two in Wales
There are various maps out there of the General Election results, but I’ve found quite a lot of them to be unsatisfactory in different ways. The House of Commons Library has tabbed the results for each seat, and the data is available below.
It’s obviously easy to find maps of the result (like those below) but interesting to see what’s going on underneath.
First, here are vote shares (on the same scale) for the main parties in Great Britain.
It’s a reminder that true three-way contests are the exception rather than the rule, particularly in England.
Instead, there are really two political systems in England: One for the South & South West where Conservatives fight Lib Dems, and another system in the rest of England, where Conservatives fight Labour.
There are 306 seats where the Conservatives and Labour battled for first, with Labour winning 219 and the Conservatives 87.
There are 84 seats where the Conservatives fought the Lib Dems for first place, with the Lib Dems winning 64 of these and the Conservatives 20.
But Labour and the Lib Dems fight only very rarely: In only 8 seats did the Lib Dems fight Labour for top place, with Labour winning 6 of these and the Lib Dems 2.
The Lib Dems have gone back to being what they were in the 1997 election - the yellow wing of an anti-Conservative coalition.
Outside the South West, which doesn’t have large cities, the urban/ non-urban split between Labour and Conservative is incredibly clear:
The Lib Dems are strongest in the greater South West and Cambridgeshire, with random hotspots elsewhere. Of the 72 seats the Lib Dems hold, 64 have the Conservatives second, 6 have the SNP second and just two have Labour second.
Other than a few seats where they broke through, Reform’s vote was very evenly spread across England and Wales. They did better on the coast, particularly east of London, better around the Wash, in the midlands, and in non-urban post-industrial areas in the north:
The Green vote in 2024 was pretty strangely distributed. They had two shire breakthroughs. They are quite strong in Bristol and Brighton (no surprise), but if you zoom in, they have a chunk of the vote across east London and in the centres of northern conurbations: Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Huddersfield (the latter is not new - they already had an office in town when I was growing up there).
In Scotland the SNP fight everywhere - as you can see from the maps above, they fight Labour in the central belt, and the Conservatives elsewhere.
In Wales, Plaid Cymru are strong in the west, but much weaker in the rest.
One thing I hadn’t really clocked is the large number of seats where “others” did well. You will have to zoom in to see as they are mainly urban. Obviously there were the four Gaza independents who got elected in Blackburn, Dewsbury & Batley, Birmingham Perry Barr and my new neighbour in Leicester South.
But ‘others’ were significant in a number of other places and the number of votes won by others was bigger than the majority in 60 seats. Most of these are driven by a single person, mainly on a Gaza ticket, though there are also unusual seats like Doncaster North, with a messy mix of various independents.
Moving on from maps to numbers, here’s the matrix of how many seats saw the different parties in first and second place.
And here is the same data totted up to show the number of contests by contest type where the largest three parties in parliament were in the top two - either in first or second.
Only 3% of the contests where the Conservatives were in the top two places were against reform (11 seats out of 414).
The Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly face Conservatives. Reform are in second place to Labour in many more places than they are in second to Conservatives, while the greens are second in far more seats where Labour hold the seat than Conservatives.
The day after the election I wrote about the “everything bagel” nature of the Conservative defeat in 2024, with multiple different causes and not just one simple thing to fix.
The list of the most marginal seats the Conservatives could gain reflects this, with opportunities all over the country, rather than just one place or type of place.
Just for fun, here is a comparison of the “right” and “left” shares of the vote. It doesn’t quite work as it is hard to place the nationalist parties, and while a number of the independents were of the left, not all were. But still, it paints a picture of how politics works now - more based on age / ethnicity / education and density rather than class or income.
And last but not least, here’s a map of the share of those who did not vote - a majority of people in a number of urban areas. Older and more affluent areas saw higher turnout.
Don't worry about where the Tories might gain seats - Reform will have eaten your lunch by the next election.
Good stuff! Thanks for crunching all the numbers! About the independent candidates who picked up votes > majority: which party was damaged the most by these independents? Also, what type of causes drove the non-Gaza independents?