Seven statistics that tell the storyline of Senedd Election 2021
The votes happen to be counted and also the 2021 race for that Senedd has ended.
Labour has secured half the seats within the next Welsh Parliament and will attempt to govern without a formal coalition inside a great personal victory for Mark Drakeford.
However, when you dig into the stats there is lots going on beneath the surface. We've been through to data to choose some of the stories you might have missed.
Mark Drakeford won twice as many votes in Cardiff West than Ukip won across Wales
There are any number of stats you could pull out to illustrate the implosion of Ukip. 5 years ago they'd seven members in the Senedd, today they have none.
They won just one fifteenth as numerous constituency votes because they did in 2021 – down from 127,038 to 8,568. Their regional vote collapsed too.
It's particularly striking that just in a single of Wales' 40 constituencies, Mark Drakeford won 17,655 votes – a lot more than twice as many constituency votes as Ukip won across Wales.
Nor is it just that the devo-sceptic vote was split this time. 5 years ago, Ukip won 12.5% from the constituency vote. This time around, Ukip, Reform and Abolish won only 3.83%. Even though you include the very different Propel, it only reaches 4.62%.
Those votes all went back towards the Tories, Labour and even Plaid. Maybe the pandemic just persuaded a lot of people they wanted more tried and tested parties in control.
714 – the number of votes by which the Lib Dems held on to their regional seat in the Senedd
In a constituency, a positive change of 714 votes will make it a marginal seat. Across an area of eight constituencies, a vote difference of this margin is breathtakingly close.
The system accustomed to work out who gets seats on Wales' regional lists is complex but you can express the slump within the Lib Dem vote very simply. Had they won 715 votes fewer across eight constituencies in mid and west Wales, they would today not have access to an agent within the Senedd.
In their target seats, where they've historically done well, the Lib Dems collapsed. Brecon and Radnorshire, Ceredigion, Cardiff Central, and Montgomeryshire were once symbolic of the Liberal Democrats in Wales. Today that's no longer true.
In Brecon and Radnorshire, where the popular longstanding MS Kirsty Williams stood down, the Lib Dem vote plummeted by 25 percentage points. In Ceredigion they lost 22% of the electorate. In Montgomeryshire, they lost 11% . In Cardiff Central, which they had touted as a two horse race between them and Labour as well as investing some serious effort and time, they lost 16% of the electorate and were left with just 5,460 votes when compared with 13,000 for Labour.
It was just their leader Jane Dodds scraping a seat in the Mid and West Wales regional election that stopped them being completely wiped out.
19.5% – the percentage from the total vote that Plaid lost in the Rhondda as its support collapsed
This was in many ways a Marmite election for Plaid. It's impossible that Plaid leader Adam Price could be anything other than disappointed.
Yes, the party gained one MS. Yes, the party was just 21 regional list votes away from gaining a second regional MS in North Wales and denying the Conservatives their second spot on the list. But that wasn't within the script.
Last autumn Mr Price told WalesOnline that "anything other than First Minister will be a failure" and now they have gained one solitary seat. This election Plaid Cymru put Welsh independence front and centre of the campaign so could there be an argument that this failed?
Well it depends in which you look. Plaid made some decent gains within their heartlands:
- Ceredigion up 14%
- Arfon up 8.5%
- Montgomeryshire up 7.75%
In Arfon the got the majority of the votes in the cost of Labour who fell 10%. So clearly their platform was striking a chord with some the bottom. However, this has come at the cost of the Valley seats that they need to win and hold if they are ever the largest party.
Here we see a really different story.
They lost a fifth from the electorate both in Rhondda and Blaenau Gwent. There might have been local factors that exaggerated this decline but it's not a resounding endorsement of the leader's strategy. Within an election in which the smaller parties' vote collapsed to the benefit of Labour and the Tories, Plaid stood still up. You can read a complete analysis of this here.
Five – the amount of extra seats the Conservatives won
The Tories is going to be disappointed that Labour won a working majority but that shouldn't disguise the truth that the Conservatives made some gains with five more seats. The party's share from the vote also rose significantly from 21.1% five years ago to 26.1% today.
There were some seats where they saw a significant increase in vote share with Brecon and Radnorshire, Newport East, Dwyfor Meirionnydd and Alyn and Deeside all seeing double digit percentage point increases.
The only lost vote share in six of 40 seats as well as them, and of those Gower and Cardiff North were down only by single percentage point.
46.6% – turnout was up
Turnout increased to 46.6% from 45.5% which, given there is a pandemic, is quite great news.
The five places using the highest turnout were:
- Cardiff North 58.08%
- Brecon and Radnorshire 57.50%
- Carmarthenshire East and Dinefwr 56.35%
- Ceredigion 55.74%
- Vale of Glamorgan 55.01%
The five places with the lowest turnout was:
- Swansea East 35.41%
- Torfaen 37.27%
- Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney 37.58%
- Newport East 38.32%
- Cynon Valley 39.05%
The areas using the biggest increases in turnout were Alyn and Deeside (4.62%), Cardiff South and Penarth (4.44%) and Monmouth (3.69%).
So how come turnout matter when analysing an election? Well it can be seen as a benchmark of how engaged the electorate are using the process. Historically low turnouts in previous elections were often pointed to by anti devolution parties as a reason to abolish the Senedd.
The recent pandemic has raised the public's understanding of devolved matters who have been a reasons for the increase in turnout. However, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, an area often in the centre from the pandemic in Wales, actually saw undoubtedly the biggest fall in turnout by using it dropping eight percentage points.
49.3% – the proportion from the electorate in Cardiff West who place a tick in the box next to Mark Drakeford's name.
Mark Drakeford scored an enormous personal victory in the Cardiff West seat.
In 2021 he narrowly held onto his seat after a close call with Neil McEvoy, then of Plaid Cymru. The Labour leader got 11,381 votes to Plaid's 10,205. This time around things were different with the First Minister getting a whopping 17,665 votes compared to the 6,454 from his nearest challenger the Tories.
Increasing a big part by 10,000 seats is fairly impressive. A number of this is down to local circumstances since popular local candidate Neil McEvoy left Plaid. However this supports the opinion polls going back to last summer for the reason that Mark Drakeford has immense personal popularity.
Five – more parties could be represented in the Senedd (a minimum of) when we were built with a truly proportional system of election
Because Wales doesn't possess a truly proportional electoral system, the final constitute from the Senedd doesn't fully reflect the range of votes cast in Wales.
This graphic enables you to compare exactly what the Senedd would seem like within proportional system compared to what actually happened. If everyone in Wales voted because they did within the regional ballot under a truly proportional system, then there'd be nine parties represented in the next Welsh Parliament not just four:
Read a full analysis from it here.
