Every day until the election, James Kelly of ScotGoesPop is profiling Scotland’s UK Parliament constituencies
GLENROTHES
Winner in 2017: Peter Grant (SNP)
SNP sources were reported in connection to the Panelbase poll as saying they had evidence that voters who would normally be solidly SNP were switching to the Tories in this particular election due to Brexit .
There’s no obvious sign of that trend in the Panelbase datasets, but if it’s happening it raises the possibility that the Tories’ coalition of support may be somewhat different from last time, which means there’s no guarantee that it will be as efficiently distributed as before. One possibility is that the Tories could pointlessly gain extra votes in a constituency like Glenrothes, which is estimated to have had an unusually high Leave vote of 46%, but which will not realistically be electing a Tory MP any time soon.
The gap between the SNP and Conservatives in the constituency was more than 23% in 2017, which means that on a uniform swing the Tories would need a thoroughly improbable Scotland-wide lead of 15% before they can expect to unseat Peter Grant. Even if Leave voters help them outperform the national trend somewhat, it simply won’t be enough.
It remains the case that the only conceivable threat to the SNP in Glenrothes is from Labour. The constituency is of course still synonymous with the titanic by-election struggle of 2008, which was comfortably won by Labour in defiance of predictions of an SNP gain. That result led to a tremendous sense of pessimism about the SNP’s chances of ever competing properly with Labour at Westminster level, even in areas where they already held the equivalent Holyrood seat. When the 2015 landslide came, though, Glenrothes proved no more resistant to the SNP’s charms than any other part of Labour’s former heartlands. A large swing back to Labour in 2017 means the seat is now technically a marginal, but a further substantial swing of 4% would be needed for Labour to grab the seat this time.
READ MORE: General Election Analysis: Stirling
On current trends, that’s extremely unlikely. This should be a straightforward SNP hold.
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