A looming stalemate in Cardiff Bay

We've dived deep into the numbers to understand what the general election of May this year tells us about the upcoming battle for the Senedd in 2026

Welcome to the first edition of The Journal. We’re going to tackle a wide range of issues with different of types of reports in this newsletter. But we’re going to start with politics.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are one of the enlightened, admirable people who follow political news in Wales. But even the most engaged devotee would have to admit that Welsh elections haven’t been a rollercoaster. Compared to Westminster’s occasional landslides, elections here have been a gentle river meandering in well defined boundaries. Aside from a heady few days in 2007 when there was ever-so-briefly discussion of a rainbow coalition, there has never been a serious danger of a change of power.

The chart above, which plots the vote share for the three biggest parties at Welsh elections since 1999, suggests we’re a people who have been pretty consistent in our political choices.

And yet there is reason to believe that things could be different in May 2026 when Wales next goes to the polls. Our analysis these things suggests we’re on course for a very difficult political stalemate. This may not go as far, on current trends at least, as to make Rhun ap Iorwerth the First Minister he says he will be in his speech to the Plaid party conference today (Friday, October 10), but it will present our leaders with a difficult set of challenges.

The reason to think it’ll be different this time is that Labour’s 39.9% share of the vote at the last Welsh election 2021 was flattered by the huge gratitude many felt at Mark Drakeford’s leadership during the pandemic. Since then we’ve had a wave of public anger at the new 20mph law in Wales and the disaster of Vaughan Gething’s short leadership. We saw the impact of these trends at the ballot box earlier this year when Labour’s share of the vote in Wales fell in the general election. In 2021, the Tories similarly benefited from the election falling when Boris Johnson was still seen as an endearing joker and not a dangerously irresponsible clown. And we’ve all had a ringside seat for the Conservative leadership merry-go-round that has followed since.

While the biggest two parties have been struggling, others have been enjoying the benefit. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won a lot of votes in Wales in this year’s General Election, their 16.9% putting them in third place. And had the party been able to field a candidate in Blaenau Gwent, that might well have been second. Plaid also saw a leap in votes to 14.8% under a new leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth.

In this newsletter we wanted to look at what these trends might mean for the political battleground on which the next Senedd election will be fought. There is every hope that this will be a Welsh election fought on Welsh issues - one where the performance of the Welsh Government is debated rather than it becoming a proxy vote on the performance of the UK Government. 

But we wanted to take a detailed look at how the votes we saw in May might translate into seats at a Welsh election. This allows us to understand politics in Wales as it is right now. And it gives us a chance to look at how the new electoral map for Welsh elections - with 16 super constituencies made up of two Westminster constituencies paired together - will affect the parties’ chances at the Senedd election in 2026. This map shows how the new political map of Wales will look:

All of these constituencies will return six MSs to Cardiff Bay. Voters will choose a party and a system of proportional representation will be used to determine which politicians get a seat from the lists of six names chosen by each party. In all likelihood, all constituencies will send politicians from a mix of parties into the Senedd.

How we put together our findings

Please remember that our findings are not a prediction. A lot will change between now and May 2026.  All we’ve tried to do is understand where we are now as the parties look forward to their next big date with the ballot box.

We started by looking at voting trends. There has been a Welsh election one or two years after six different general elections since the dawn of devolution. And there are clear patterns. 

Plaid always gets more votes in Wales elections than in Westminster polls. Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems usually get fewer. 

The scale of those changes vary significantly. But on average over the last 25 years, Plaid has won nearly twice as high a share of the vote at Welsh elections than it has won at the UK election before (an increase of 92% to be exact).

As you can see from the chart above, Plaid’s support has been fairly consistent at both Westminster and Welsh elections. The big question now is whether there will be spike upwards in Plaid support at the Welsh election in May 2026 to follow the spike upwards at the 2024 general election. If it does, that line chart below could look a bit like this

There will be a lot of factors that could derail this but it would only take Plaid’s vote back to the level it won in the otherwise outlier first Welsh election of 1999.

Plaid’s extra share of the vote in Senedd elections is usually taken fairly evenly from all the other parties, whose vote share is down to around 85% of its Westminster level in subsequent Assembly or Senedd elections. 

It’s important to remember that these won’t be the exact trends we see in 2026. After the public gave Gordon Brown the boot in 2010, Labour support in Wales bucked the trend and was slightly higher at the Assembly election that followed in 2011. There have been other exceptions as well. But in five out of six Welsh elections, Labour, Tories and Lib Dems have all seen their vote share fall compared to the previous UK election. And Plaid has seen an increase in every single one. 

We calculated an average of those differences. The figures below show how much more, or less, of the vote a party has won in a Welsh election on average compared to UK one immediately preceding it over the last 25 years.

Plaid: 192%

Conservatives: 85.6%

Labour: 84.9%

Lib Dems: 84.3%

We then applied this factor to the voting totals in all of Wales’ 32 constituencies. We paired those constituencies together as is done on the new political map of Wales. We then applied the same method of proportional representation, the D’Hondt method, used in Welsh elections. And we used the entirely theoretical voting totals that resulted to work out what the impact might be at the next Senedd election. 

It’s on course to be a colossal mess

Before we go into it, please accept our projection for what it is - a simple read across from May this year to May 2026 with an adjustment for how voting trends usually differ. It’s not a poll or a prediction. We’re not saying this is what is going to happen. It just gives an insight into political opinion in Wales right now and what it means for the battleground on which the next Senedd election will be fought.

Our projection suggests the election could be a mess that will take a lot of sorting out. This would be the make-up of the new Senedd under our projection:

There are some big headlines. Reform would have more seats than the Tories (17 to the Tories’ 13). The Lib Dems would still only have one MS, in Dwyfor Meirionnydd and Montgomeryshire. And, although this point has a niche audience, making a nice colourful political map of Wales is going to be an absolute nightmare when it’s divided into six constituencies each of which have MPs of up to five different flavours. We borrowed the nice Parliament chart from Flourish for the illustration above.

But the standout point is that Labour would be significantly weakened. First Minister Eluned Morgan is going to have a huge headache. Labour  currently has exactly half of the seats in the Senedd but would only have 40%, 39 of 96 seats, under this projection. That’s the lowest share of the seats it has ever had. Even at its previously weakest point at the tail end of the Blair and Brown years, Labour in Wales was in a stronger position after the election in 2007. Then Rhodri Morgan’s party won 26 seats (43.3% of then the 60-seat Assembly). That year he went into a formal coalition with Plaid Cymru.

In one sense, this gives Plaid’s Rhun ap Iorwerth great power thanks to his 26 seats and status as the official opposition. But he also will have few other options. A coalition of Plaid, Reform and Tories might have enough seats to govern. But it’s hard to believe any of those parties would think it was in their political interests to join such a coalition - or that they would be able to agree on a programme of government. So Plaid would have a choice of chaos under a minority Labour administration or supporting their great rival, yet again.

If you want to see the breakdown of the number of MS in each constituency under our projection it’s here:

Aberafan Maesteg, Rhondda, Ogmore: 

Labour (3), Plaid (2), Reform (1)

Alyn and Deeside and Wrexham: 

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Bangor, Aberconwy Ynys Mon: 

Labour (1), Plaid (3), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Blaenau Gwent, Rhymney and Caerphilly: 

Labour (3), Plaid (2), Conservatives (0), Reform (1)

Brecon Radnor, Neath and Swansea East: 

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (0), Reform (2)

Vale of Glamorgan and Bridgend: 

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Camarthenshire: 

Labour (1), Plaid (4), Conservatives (0), Reform (1)

Cardiff East and North: 

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Cardiff West, South and Penarth: 

Labour (2), Plaid (2), Reform (1), Conservatives (1)

Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire: 

Labour (1), Plaid (3), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Clwyd:

Labour (2), Plaid (1), Conservatives (2), Reform (1)

Dwyfor Meirionnydd, Montgomeryshire and Glwndwr: 

Labour (2), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1), Lib Dems (1)

Swansea West and Gower: 

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare and Pontypridd: 

Labour (3), Plaid (2), Reform (1)

Monmouthshire and Torfaen: 

Labour (3), Plaid (0), Conservatives (2), Reform (1)

Newport and Islwyn:

Labour (3), Plaid (1), Conservatives (1), Reform (1)

What the headline figures don’t tell us

Those figures alone don’t tell you many things. One is just how close it is at the fringes. The D’Hondt system of proportional representation means often be very close between a party winning a second or third seat in a constituency and a smaller party winning its first.

What the data underpinning our projection shows is that it could be even better for Reform and worse for Labour. Because Nigel Farage’s party didn’t have a Blaenau Gwent candidate in May, we couldn’t add in a vote total for them for that area for this calculation. Just using their Caerphilly vote total, the party is on course win one seat in the paired Blaenau Gwent and Caerphilly super constituency. But add in a similar number of votes Blaenau Gwent and they could well win two. That’s most likely to be winning a seat at the expense of Labour which would weaken Eluned Morgan even further.

Labour’s 39 seats is far from guaranteed in other ways. There are several areas where Labour is likely to be the first party to lose a seat if another party performs better than our projection suggests. 

And this is despite the fact that the new political map of Wales arguably favours Labour. We tried two other ways of combining the seats, both of which gave Labour fewer seats than the combination chosen by the boundary commission.

What the headline figures also don’t show is just how hard it is for a smaller party like the Greens to win a seat, despite the system being labelled proportional representation. By breaking Wales up into sixteen super constituencies, it still favours the major parties - while giving Reform much more of a chance than it would have in a straight first past the post constituency system as we have at Westminster.

There is still a huge amount to play for

For all the parties, there is a long way to go. So much can and will change before the next Welsh election. 

We’ve got a new Labour government at Westminster enduring a rocky start to life in government. Yet in the party’s favour, the unpopular Vaughan Gething is no longer the leader in Wales, anger at 20mph appears to be susbsiding and new First Minister Eluned Morgan will be hoping to carve out her own path. 

By early next month the Conservatives will have a new leader in London. It looks set to be either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick, both of whom have espoused right wing policies. Will those alienate a Welsh electorate or will they help the Conservatives win back supporters from Reform? There’s also no guarantee that Senedd group leader Andrew RT Davies survives in his role until May 2026.

Looking at Plaid Cymru, the question is whether the party’s surge earlier this year turn out to be just people who already vote for it in Welsh elections also doing so at Westminster out of disillusionment with the other parties? If so, it won’t have much impact at a Welsh election. If they’re new supporters of the Party of Wales, then it will.

And when it comes to Reform, how easily will Nigel Farage find it to get the level of publicity he had going into the general election? And will there be any skeletons found lurking in the CVs of the candidates it fields for May 2026.  The reason the party had no Blaenau Gwent candidate in May is because he quit after claims he had reposted racist content.

All of these questions will shape what happens in 18 months time. It would be brave to predict any landslides but that gently flowing river might have a surprise in it.