Beginning this year, &Elections is producing General Election Equivalent Seat Estimates (GEESE) and General Election Equivalent Vote Estimates (GEEVE) for local election results to make it easier to more accurately and wholistically understand the attitudes of the electorate in between general elections than polling or modelling of local election results has hitherto allowed.
Overview of the Results
This GEESE for this year’s local elections indicates that Reform would be short of a majority by 31 seats if a general election coincided with the local elections. The Liberal Democrats would make modest gains; although, by virtue of being the only establishment party in England to not be eviscerated by Reform, they would form the Official Opposition – with their efficiently concentrated vote share meaning that Davey’s party would achieve this despite being 4.8pp behind the Conservatives’ second-place vote share, and still being fifth in overall vote share. Badenoch’s party, meanwhile, would face major losses overall, but the picture would remain mixed for them – as the unmitigated obliteration they would suffer in their rural heartlands to Reform and the Liberal Democrats would be somewhat (albeit nowhere near wholly) displaced by minor victories in affluent metropolitan areas where they would seek to make gains from Labour.
The governing Labour party, however, would see its vote share more than halve to 17.0% and would be pulverised to only 56 seats if the local election results were borne out in a general election scenario. This would be not only catastrophic, but could have a legitimate implication of being existentially damaging to the Labour Party, as despite the Tories being relegated to an abysmal showing, they would have a comparatively more resilient constituency of voters to build from, as the lack of an absolute electoral vapourisation despite being trounced by Reform on their right would be viewed as a minor victory. Labour, unlike the Conservatives, must contend with losing six-sevenths of their seats to both an insurgent party on the right in Reform, and an insurgent party on the left in the Greens, and would face losses to literally every single one of the other major parties. On this point, the inefficient concentration of Labour votes compared to other parties is also noteworthy because it indicates that their coalition of voters is, at least geographically, increasingly disparate – with heretofore unlosable inner metropolitan seats being swept up by the Greens (who would be four seats behind them despite having a vote share 1.7pp less than Starmer’s party) and their post-industrial heartlands, rife with political alienation and chronic under-investment, being mopped up by Reform.
As for the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the civic nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales would for the first time top the poll in each together, although the attitudes of voters for each of these parties are not always the same. In Scotland, the SNP’s vote share is set to increase only marginally on their performance in 2024, with the relative homogeneity of the political behaviour of most Scottish seats meaning that they would fall like dominoes back to the SNP as 2024 Scottish Labour voters desert Starmer’s party in droves, despite a malaise of political disenchantment for both. As for Plaid Cymru, supporters are much more hopeful about the potential the party has, with them having never previously formed a government in Cardiff Bay, and Labour voters appear to be abandoning their party in droves for them – meaning that, under this estimate, Plaid Cymru would win the vast majority of Welsh seats, with Reform winning the rest, and Labour on zero.
With regard to independents and others, it is worth examining that &Elections’ recent forecasts have not adequately accounted for the disconnect between minor right-wing and left-wing parties and independents: in the last general election, all of the independents that won did so on a left-wing platform; however, with the rise of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain to Farage’s right, those opting for others and independents in opinion polls are increasingly right-wing – but until now, no empirical data has been able to establish correctly where this disparate group of voters sit. &Elections’ GEESE would have others on 8 seats in total, with seats like Lowe’s own Great Yarmouth set to be in this column. Despite the increased accuracy at identifying where voters sit ideologically, it is still important to remember that the prominence of independents and others in parliamentary constituencies does not exactly match their prominence in council wards – perhaps best illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North being set to return to Labour under this estimate.
How It’s Calculated
England
The results used are based on the percentage of the absolute total number of votes cast for each party throughout the whole of each local authority. As, in some areas, there are multiple tiers of local government (in county and district councils), whereas in others there is just one – for elections to upper-tier county councils (East Sussex, Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and each of the new Surrey shadow unitary authorities), the result for each of their component lower-tier districts is used. Where there were concurrent elections to both a district council and its county council (for example, Fareham and Hastings), the cumulative absolute vote of both elections is used.
Plainly, because there are thousands of wards and no publicly accessible centralised database of ward-level results of local elections, and because several authorities’ ward boundaries have changed since the latest boundary review of parliamentary constituencies, it is not feasible to make calculations based on every individual election in every ward. Because of this, another measure needs to be used to calculate where votes are concentrated – this is where &Elections’ underlying general election forecast, backdated to the day of the local elections, is used.
To ensure the results between council elections and the general election projection can be mapped accurately, each constituency is broken down into its individual local authority ward components, as established in the 2023 boundary review of parliamentary constituencies (with partial wards separated). After this, each ward is attributed a number of votes for each party, equal to the number of votes &Elections’ backdated forecast had for its constituency, multiplied by the proportion of registered voters in the whole of the constituency that reside there. For each local authority, the backdated forecast for each ward is accumulated to translate the backdated general election forecast from constituencies onto them. This means that for local authorities that had elections, the magnitudinal difference for each party in the percentage of forecast and actual votes is calculated. Then, the weighted average (by forecasted general election turnout) of the magnitudinal difference for each of the authorities that had elections is applied to the backdated forecast for those that did not to estimate how those local authorities would have voted, and the results and estimations of those that did and did not have elections are aggregated. This then flows back through the ward data, back to the individual constituencies – with the results for each ward multiplied by the magnitudinal difference between the backdated forecast for the ward’s constituency and local authority to ensure the estimation reflects how each individual constituency would have voted as opposed to the aggregate of its component local authorities.
A significant issue with this method of modelling, however, is that local authorities in England elect councillors via a hybrid of first past the post (FPTP) and plurality block voting (PBV), and where an authority exclusively uses one system or another, this theoretically does not cause issues, although, if a local authority has wards with a varying number of members, this makes the tabulation of absolute votes throughout the authority a less reliable indicator of the public opinion expressed in the election. This is because, under PBV (which is used to elect candidates to multi-member wards) people are entitled to vote as many times as there are candidates to elect, meaning that if a party has 1,000 voters in a ward with one seat, but 3,000 voters in a ward with three seats, assuming the party stands the maximum number of candidates, 9,000 votes would be cast for the party in the three-member ward, and only 1,000 votes would be cast in the single-member ward. Now, usually the discrepancy between the cumulative absolute number of votes, and the number of votes weighed by turnout is not substantial, and this does not even apply to all authorities, but even using turnout-weighted vote could produce misleading results, as, where parties stand one or more, but below the maximum number of candidates they may field to a multi-member ward, their vote is artificially suppressed by prospective voters hypothetically using their other vote or votes for other parties. Without additional cumbersome modelling, it would be impossible to both model for, and assume what the genuine voting intention for all individual wards would be, and both would likely not add any additional substantial accuracy to the model either.
Even though this does not account for individual wards, it is nevertheless a relatively accurate way of estimating the result in each constituency. For example, in Makerfield – the seat on most people’s minds at the time of writing – &Elections’ LEGEEE model is accurate to the local elections results within the constituency for every party within 2.8pp.
Scotland
For the Scottish parliamentary election, the model fundamentally operates on the same principles as England’s – whereby the results of Westminster constituencies are mapped to compare alongside the results in Holyrood constituencies through the council wards that define their boundaries. Where this differs with England’s model, however, is that it does not have to estimate the results of entire constituencies, as every constituency had an election in Scotland. It is worth noting that the results for regional lists were discarded – as they have little bearing on a FPTP contest, even though it is hypothetically possible that the flexibility of the additional member system (AMS) as a hybrid system could mean that tactical voting in constituencies may be more prominent.
In seats that were not contested by all main parties, their vote share, if they had been standing, was estimated and calculated similarly to unknown results in England – where the result of the backdated forecast was applied, modified by the magnitudinal difference between known results and itself. This means that the forecast assumes a general election scenario where all parties stand candidates in all constituencies, which, while it would not be guaranteed to occur, was chosen as it is much more likely that, for example, the Scottish Greens (who only stood six constituency candidates at this election) would be closer to standing a full slate of candidates than only six in a general election. Importantly, though, it should be reconciled: this does have the potential to make the estimate slightly more inaccurate, as even though it attempts to mimic the realism of universal candidacy in a general election, it means that the estimate (particularly for the Scottish Greens) is grounded in comparatively much less empirical data, and that which does exist may still be flawed due to the multitude of variable dynamics that the use of different voting systems entails (such as tactical voting).
Wales
The new electoral system makes Wales much easier to forecast – both because of the conterminousness of constituency boundaries with those for Westminster and because the election has illustrated that constituency-based party list proportional representation (which normally favours large parties, because it can only be proportional to the closest sixth) elicits the dynamic of tactical voting that exists with FPTP. Because the conterminousness of boundaries means that each Senedd constituency is simply two adjacent Westminster constituencies combined – all that this estimate fundamentally has to do is separate the result of each Senedd constituency into two. This is achieved by taking the backdated forecast for each Westminster constituency and aggregating these into their Senedd constituency equivalents, before applying the magnitudinal difference between the Senedd results and Westminster forecast to Senedd constituencies onto the backdated forecast for each Westminster constituency.
Despite this voting system meaning that vote share can be more accurately translated to that for Westminster elections, the large size of constituencies needed to facilitate this system means that parties’ local support becomes diluted as voters choose parties they believe will have a better chance of winning nationally. This estimate, for example, has the Liberal Democrats in fourth in Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe – on 13.7%, down from 29.5% at the general election – and has Plaid Cymru winning Cardiff South and Penarth despite coming fifth with 8.2% at the general election – having performed nearly half as well as the Greens on 14.5% (their best performance in Wales), whose support would only have increased by 0.3pp in this estimate.
Comparisons With Existing Models
Currently, Sky News and BBC News have their own models of estimating what the results of local elections would be as a nationwide poll. These models, however, are fundamentally different from &Elections’ LEGEEE. BBC News’ Projected National Share (PNS) and Sky News’ National Equivalent Vote (NEV) are both exclusively based on trends in England – as these are easier to consistently model year-on-year, as local elections do not happen in Wales or Scotland every year. The replicability of these models in every election is their primary advantage over &Elections’ projection. Furthermore, instead of being based on the results of every council up for election, these models are based on the results and swings of wards that are representative of the national electorate and in which the major parties have all contested.
Ultimately, because these projections are not designed to be representative of an election to the House of Commons, they are more unreliable at estimating what the nationwide vote share for an election to Parliament would be. Therein lies an issue with Sky News’ House of Commons projection based on its National Equivalent Vote estimate – as the NEV was not designed specifically to be representative of a parliamentary election, the figures it produces are less accurate. &Elections’ General Election Equivalent Vote/Seat Estimate (GEEV/SE), however, is specifically designed to capture what the equivalent result of a general election would be using the local election results. As this means many seats are grounded exclusively in the tangible results of the local elections in each local area, the GEESE model is more able to accurately capture the number of seats each party would have won. As Sky’s NEV seat estimate only applies the uniform national swing onto a generic projection, it risks encountering the issue of producing an estimate that would be impossible to replicate with the empirical results of the election – and, in fact, does encounter this issue – with Sky’s NEV estimating that the results of the local elections would yield the Greens only 13 seats, while, under &Elections’ GEESE model, 38 of the 52 seats it projects for the Greens are based on the actual results of the election – and despite it being hypothetically possible that unanticipated intra-authority discrepancies could mean that some seats estimated solely on election results could be inaccurately projected, it would be nigh impossible for that to have occurred in at least 25 of 38 instances.
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