Our current polling average puts the Greens on just under 9% on the constituency ballot, and 12.7% on the regional list. The regional list is fine, but the constituency ballot is impossible. The Greens are standing in 6 seats, if they got 100% of the vote in all of them it would come out at about 7.5% of the vote.
We expect the Greens to do pretty well in all their target seats and to be in with a shot of winning some of them, but 100% is obviously not happening. So, let’s say they average about a third of the vote in each of their 6 seats - which is more realistic - that gets them to about 2.5% of the national vote. That would still be double what they got in 2021 even though they stood in 12 places back then. That leaves a huge number of Green voters who simply won’t have their preferred party on the ballot.
The 6 Seats
The Greens are running in 6 seats. We treat them as normal, projecting them based on their nominal vote shares from 2021 and their polling average. The nominals 2021 results are an amended version of those from Ballot Box Scotland but we have adjusted some of them and made our own for Shetland. They have picked 5 of their strongest seats but it is odd, to us, that they haven’t chanced their hand at Aberdeen Central and a few more seats in Glasgow & Edinburgh.
Our 1000x model gives them a non-zero chance of winning all 6, although for Shetland it’s just about non-zero. Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill and Edinburgh Central are favoured to go Green. Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith and Glasgow Southside are pure toss ups, with Edinburgh Northern being less likely.
- Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill (~97.2%)
- Edinburgh Central (~95.9%)
- Edinburgh North Eastern & Leith (~52.5%)
- Glasgow Southside (~49.1%)
- Edinburgh Northern (~9%)
- Shetland Islands (~0.6%)
Shetland - the Greens longest shot
We’re a bit of an outlier amongst some other projections by having the Greens in second in Shetland and by how confident we are on them in Glasgow Kelvin & Maryhill and Edinburgh Central. I stand behind the Shetland call, it tracks more with previous results than the Reform surge being seen in some other projections, but we might be a bit overstating things in their most winnable seats.
Our Fix
For us this has been a challenge. Last month we pushed a major change which we hope will estimate it reasonably well. We assume that the majority of wannabe Green voters will back the SNP but there are a lot of Green voters who will go elsewhere, our system handles this dynamically but as a general rule, it mainly helps the SNP.
If the election was held today and the polls were right, we think the Greens would likely end up with 2-3% of the vote and the SNP could get closer to 40%. Disappointed Green voters would also probably nudge Labour’s vote share above Reform’s and help the Lib Dems close in on the Conservatives. The seat impacts of this are less nuanced.
Scottish Constituency Polling Average
Rough approximation of Green & SNP party vote shares after adjustment
Anywhere the SNP were narrowly in second place this pushes them ahead. In Aberdeenshire East, Dumfriesshire this is a big help since we expect very few Green voters to go to either the Tories or Reform. In places like Argyll & Bute and Dumbarton the impact is likely to be smaller since Labour and the Lib Dems will get a boost, but the SNP should still benefit the most.
Dealing with the Fake Greens
We’ve also had to make a smaller adjustment on the list to account for the existence of the ‘Independent Green Voice’ (IGV). This party barely exists, will not campaign and is absolutely not a ‘Green’ party. They are led by a holocaust denier and the handful of policies they do claim to support are those of any other generic far-right rabble rouser. They should be irrelevant but their name is a problem.
It appears that this party exists just to mess with the Scottish Greens by deliberately confusing voters. They know that some people don’t read their ballots very carefully and since the IGV appears first alphabetically, some people will pick the first ‘Green’ they see. In 2021 the party massively outperformed the other fringe parties in both Glasgow and South Scotland, the only regions they contested. They managed to beat parties that actually campaigned, like the Scottish Family Party, TUSC and Reform. The impact was real, it likely cost the Greens a seat in both regions with those seats instead going to the Conservatives & Labour.
West Scotland - final seat between Labour, Green & Reform
This year they’re back and standing in most regions. In today’s Nowcast this change is costing the Greens a seat in West Scotland with Labour picking up a seat instead. These are tiny margins so it may not happen anywhere, or it could happen in a few places. The Electoral Commission should have stepped in to prevent this attempt at confusing voters but they have ducked the issue and waved it through.
The Greens on the List
The Greens have always done a lot better on the regional list than in the constituencies. This is true even in the places they stood on both ballots so we know a lot of Green voters are content to only support them on the list. We have them winning at least 1 list seat in every region.
Winning 3 in Highland & Islands with just 15.7% of the vote is a mathematical oddity. It’s caused by a very specific set of circumstances involving the SNP and Lib Dems winning just enough constituencies to rule them both out of list seats and our system really not fancying any other party out here. On these exact numbers the Greens would get 2 if the Lib Dems did 0.9% better in Argyll & Bute, that would flip it to them and mean the SNP would get a list seat.
Green List Seats
The SNP would also take that list seat if they lost Argyll & Bute but got 1% more on the List ballot. Reform and Labour could also take it with tiny swings, and the fake Greens could again play a role.
All in all: The Greens are hard to call, but they should be on course for their best election ever.