The Election in Northern Ireland
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Јas
Jas
Junior Chimp
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« on: April 08, 2005, 06:03:43 AM »
« edited: July 06, 2021, 05:22:46 PM by Јas »

.
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Democratic Hawk
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« Reply #1 on: April 08, 2005, 07:49:38 AM »
« Edited: April 08, 2005, 11:16:36 AM by Democratic 'Hawk' »

Based on those predictions:
DUP  8 (+3)
SF     5 (+1)
UUP  3 (-3)
SDLP 2 (-1)

So NI would return the following to Westminster:

DUP: Paisley, P. Robinson, Dodds, Donaldson, Wilson, Campbell, I. Robinson and Simpson.

SF: Adams, McGuinness, Doherty, Gildernew, Murphy.

UUP:  Burnside, McGimpsey, Hermon.

SDLP: Durkan, McGrady.

And I'm sure they'll all fit in nicely barely distinguishable from MP's from elsewhere. Wink

A very good analysis of those seats Jas. I think it's inevitable that the DUP will become the dominant unionist party at Westminster (consolidating on their gains in the Assembly elections). I've little love for the UUP (largely due to it's his historial association with the Conservative Party). I'd like to think that the SDLP would make gains on Sinn Fein

Dave
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #2 on: April 08, 2005, 08:22:11 AM »

I don't see much hope of SDLP gains ... and my impression of the DUP is by no means better, or even just as bad, as my impression of the UU.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2005, 09:48:57 AM »

Are there any fifth parties in Northern Ireland that try to sidestep the nationalist/republican angst?
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2005, 09:51:20 AM »

Are there any fifth parties in Northern Ireland that try to sidestep the nationalist/republican angst?

Alliance: a small liberal party that (IIRC) grew out of the old NI Liberals.

Er...

That's it...
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #5 on: April 08, 2005, 11:15:53 AM »

Are there any fifth parties in Northern Ireland that try to sidestep the nationalist/republican angst?

Alliance: a small liberal party that (IIRC) grew out of the old NI Liberals.

Er...

That's it...

Do they manage to get their deposits back or are they out £9,000 (18 NI seats * £500) each election in Northern Ireland?
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #6 on: April 08, 2005, 11:52:50 AM »

Do they manage to get their deposits back or are they out £9,000 (18 NI seats * £500) each election in Northern Ireland?

It varies a hell of a lot... a good seat to try for NI elections is: www.ark.ac.uk/elections
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Jake
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« Reply #7 on: April 08, 2005, 04:22:36 PM »

Wow, excellent breakdown.  Anyone else care to try at their region?
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freek
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« Reply #8 on: April 08, 2005, 05:54:31 PM »

Why is it that the votes in Northern Ireland are counted the day after the elections, instead of election day?
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #9 on: April 08, 2005, 11:52:45 PM »

Is the UKUP going to be factor this year or will its supporters decide to vote for moderates like Paisley. Wink 
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Democratic Hawk
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« Reply #10 on: April 11, 2005, 01:01:44 PM »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4431733.stm

This is another kick in the teeth for Trimble. While Molyneaux's support for Donaldson in Lagan Valley is unsurprising, the support of both he and Smith for Spratt in South Belfast could make all the difference. Indeed it will galvanise the DUP across NI.

On the basis of this I shall be changing my call on South Belfast to a Lean DUP (from the UUP).

Therefore new overall seat distribution of NI:
DUP   9 (+4)
SF      5 (+1)
UUP   2 (-4)
SDLP  2 (-1)

Do you think the UUP will fold altogether? Looks like it has become a 'house divided among itself'

Looks like the DUP are on course to become the fourth party of Westminster!

Dave
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Silent Hunter
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« Reply #11 on: April 12, 2005, 05:02:26 AM »

Is anyone here of the opinion that Adams' call to the IRA to disband (or whatever) is an attempt to bump up the SF vote?
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Јas
Jas
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« Reply #12 on: April 12, 2005, 05:12:52 AM »

Is anyone here of the opinion that Adams' call to the IRA to disband (or whatever) is an attempt to bump up the SF vote?

I think that there is both electioneering and substance to his comments. It would have been a much bigger story but got drowned out by other news last week. With regard to the substance, we shall have to wait and see what the IRA say or do.

In electioneering terms, it is certainly aimed at the SDLP voters, in each of the 3 constituencies which the SDLP hold but can conceiveably all be taken or at least strongly challenged by SF.
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Јas
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« Reply #13 on: April 12, 2005, 05:17:53 AM »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/northern_ireland/4433887.stm

The news that McCartney will not run and that Alliance will run in North Down, means the UUP are under serious pressure here too. The seat is too close to accurately call now, momentum is clearly with the DUP, but Hermon appears to be reasonably popular.

Prediction Altered:
NORTH DOWN: Tossup UUP (HOLD)
 
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Peter
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« Reply #14 on: April 21, 2005, 06:59:07 AM »

For those of you that don't know of this already, there is a contest for successfully guessing the results of the Northern Ireland seats, and there is actually a chance of winning a book or $50 worth of online book vouchers.

Its run by a guy called Nicholas Whyte and you can enter here

Its worth a guess and we give plenty of guidance here on the seats, though you may have to guess the local election seats.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #15 on: April 21, 2005, 07:54:49 AM »

I keep getting told "the total number of seats predicted does not add up to 582"...no matter how exactly it does do so.
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Jake
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« Reply #16 on: April 21, 2005, 11:09:28 AM »

I entered that.  Pretty cool actually Smiley
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #17 on: April 21, 2005, 12:34:39 PM »

Nice to see Whyte do that again... I'll enter when I've had a close look at last year's locals...
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Јas
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« Reply #18 on: April 21, 2005, 01:13:56 PM »

Its difficult to see how Mark Durkan and the SDLP will be able to make a sucess of this campaign. Durkan's all too public row with independent candidate Kieran Deeny in West Tyrone, neither helps him nor his party. He is increasingly a man under pressure, and the pressure is really starting to show. Their only chance of a seat gain is South Belfast, but this would be because of a split unionist vote more than anything else.

PREDICTION ALTERATION:
FOYLE: Tossup SDLP (HOLD)
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Kevinstat
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« Reply #19 on: April 21, 2005, 08:42:39 PM »
« Edited: April 22, 2005, 08:48:25 PM by Kevinstat »

Where will the PUP (Progressive Unionist Party) vote go to in North and East Belfast?  Their candidate David Ervine received 10% of the vote in East Belfast in both the 2001 Westminster Election and the 2003 Assembly Election.  The DUP led the UUP 39% to 33% in that election, down from a 43% to 23% margin in the 2001 Westminster Election.  But Nicholas Whyte points out that the DUP have always done better in Westminster elections than in other elections, and indeed they only led the UUP 36% to 29% in the 2001 Local Government Election, held as in this year at the same time as the Westminster Election.  The PUP are linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group which, according to wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Volunteer_Force ), have killed more people than any other Protestant paramilitary organization, but they supported the Good Friday Agreement (I wonder if the amnesty clause had something to do with that), so it's tough to tell which party those voters would support.  As its name kind of implies, the PUP are considered to be a left-wing Unionist party, so those voters might support the Workers party candidate or whichever of the DUP and UUP candidates are more to the left, at least on fiscal issues.  I'm sure some voters who supported the PUP in those elections never considered themselves members of that party but liked Ervine in those elections, and it's tough to tell how those voters will vote.

While the PUP have been a presence in other constituencies in the past, their support outside of East Belfast seems to have either declined or been inconsistent (with no candidates running and thus not an environment where people become core PUP voters without experience voting for other parties or not voting) over the past several elections, or miniscule to begin with.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #20 on: April 22, 2005, 04:16:56 AM »

Why? Is Ervine not running or what?
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Јas
Jas
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« Reply #21 on: April 22, 2005, 02:57:19 PM »

From The Irish Times, Wed 20 Apr:
Empey's chances significantly boosted in East Belfast
Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor
             
Election Diary: David Ervine pulled out of the Westminster election yesterday, which makes East Belfast more interesting. He'll be campaigning for a place on Belfast City Council but won't be challenging the DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson for a seat in the House of Commons in East Belfast.

Ervine's withdrawal gives the Ulster Unionist Westminster candidate, Sir Reg Empey, something more than a theoretical chance of winning the seat from Ian Paisley's presumed heir apparent.

In the Assembly elections in 2003, the DUP polled 2,000 votes more than the UUP. In the same election, Ervine polled 3,000 votes, and if the votes of the Progressive Unionist Party transferred to Sir Reg, then he could defeat Robinson.

Based on the last Westminster battle in 2001, the combined UUP and PUP vote would not topple Robinson, but the candidate then was the relatively unknown Tim Lemon. Empey carries more clout.

Alliance has a strong candidate in East Belfast, Naomi Long, and how she fares will probably tell whether one of the biggest upsets of the election is on the cards.

Alliance and PUP supporters voting tactically for Empey would make it troublesome for Robinson. An upset would also depend on a considerable number of the 3,000 or so SDLP and Sinn Féin supporters voting UUP.

Odds are still in Robinson's favour but at least for the election obsessives, East Belfast is now quietly unpredictable. "Peter Robinson has always been a minority candidate in East Belfast," says David Ervine, who would be very happy to see PUP voters transferring to Sir Reg in the Westminster bout - as long as they remember to stick with him in the local poll.

He wonders though whether the PSNI money-laundering investigation and the high-profile searching of the home and offices of UUP Assembly member Michael Copeland will damage Empey, even though Sir Reg is not part of that investigation.

"I smell dirty tricks here, I really do, and I believe the target ultimately is Empey. At the very least, the police could have handled this more sensitively," he says.

But that's enough of a soft sell for Sir Reg from Ervine. Of more pressing concern for him is his political future and that of his party.

To maintain a political platform, Ervine and some of his colleagues must be returned in the local elections.

The PUP is fielding 13 candidates and hoping to hold at least its four council seats, three in Belfast and one in Castlereagh. It won't be easy. The PUP's other high-profile candidate, Billy Hutchinson, has a tough battle to retain his Belfast City Council seat in the Oldpark north of the city.

It's a long way from the exhilarating, heady days of October 1994 when Ervine and Hutchinson, with the likes of Gusty Spence, Gary McMichael and David Adams, played a crucial part in persuading the UVF and UDA to declare a ceasefire. The PUP flourished for a while, while the UDA's political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party, gradually imploded.

It's tight going now for the PUP but Ervine is categoric that his party still has a vital and positive role to play.

"We are democratisers," he says. By that he means the party can exert a positive influence over the UVF.

It hasn't always been successful, he admits, but adds: "Hundreds and hundreds of lives have been saved because of the loyalist ceasefire. Nobody can take that away from us. And you must remember that there has been no death in Northern Ireland by bomb or bullet since the turn of the year. And they say people like me have been a failure!"

Nobody can gainsay that argument but the trouble for the PUP is that ordinary unionists don't show any gratitude.

Ervine predicts that the IRA will disarm and enter into "a new mode" and that under pressure from George Bush, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern the DUP and UUP will be compelled to start talking to Sinn Féin again.

As for loyalist paramilitarism, he believes it has reached a double fork in the road and that it will travel three ways.

"There will be those who'll think the war is over and who'll go away. There'll be those who are prepared to try and make their communities work.

"And there'll be those who'll act as if patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and that's the group I worry about," says Ervine.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #22 on: April 22, 2005, 03:08:47 PM »

What effect will the Conservative Party have on the three NI seats it’s running for?
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #23 on: April 22, 2005, 03:11:31 PM »

What effect will the Conservative Party have on the three NI seats it’s running for?

Put it like this: that's £1,500 gone down the drain. The Tories NI experiment did fairly well at first (winning a load of council seats in North Down and doing fairly well there in the 92 General election) but they collapsed following the North Down by-election in the mid-90's.
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« Reply #24 on: April 24, 2005, 06:06:02 PM »
« Edited: April 25, 2005, 10:18:36 PM by Kevinstat »

I submitted my predictions for Nicholas Whyte's contest last night (although I had been working on it off and on for a few days actually - I took the contest very seriously).  Here are my seat-by-seat predictions, with some explanations for them in parentheses).

East Belfast: DUP (David Ervine's exit from the race and support of Empey, plus some tactical voting from Alliance and nationalists, could make the result close, but Robinson has always done better in Westminster elections than the DUP has in other elections, and I think he will survive)

North Belfast: DUP (I was tempted to pick SF to win an upset here, and am still considering changing my prediction, because of the results of the 2003 Assembly elections where the two main Nationalist parties combined to receive about .2% more of the first place vote than the two main Unionist ones, but two other clearly Unionist parties, one which probably contributed to the UUPs low showing in that election and the other whose voters will likely vote for Dodds, combined to receive about 6.8% of the vote in that election, plus the clearly Unionist parties (DUP, UUP and PUP) received only about 1% more of the first place in the 2001 local goverment election while running about 6.6% ahead in the Westminster election that year, so I think Dodds will survive)

South Belfast: UUP (I know a couple UUP big wigs, yes the incumbent and a former party leader, are supporting the DUP candidate, but the UUP's McGimpsey has topped the poll in the last two Assembly elections, in which Westminster incumbent Smyth was not a candidate but in which the UUP led the DUP anyway, plus there may be some tactical Alliance and homeless PUP votes for McGimpsey, so I predict him to win, albeit narrowly.  As for the SDLP, they didn't get half the combined UUP and DUP vote in 2003, and with an experienced Sinn Fein candidate and MLA in the race I don't think they can do that this time, which they would have to in order to win.)

West Belfast: Sinn Fein (I'm not going to waist my time explaining that one)

East Antrim: DUP (Beggs has too small a cushion from 2001 to survive, especially when his then-and-now DUP challenger is now an Assembly member from that constituency Smiley )

North Antrim: DUP (see West Belfast)

South Antrim: UUP (I get the sense that Burnside has found his niche as an elective office holder of his party, which should make him a stronger candidate; I think the DUP ads accusing him of flip-flopping will backfire, even though they are responding to Burnside making similar accusations of the DUP)

North Down: UUP (It seems like the main battleground here for quite a while, especially in Westminster elections, was the UUP v. Bob McCartney.  Even though the DUP have made significant gains here in the past few elections, not counting the 2001 Westminster elections where they didn't stand, and seem like the logical inheritors of the McCartney/UKUP vote, they have not run a campaign for a Westminster seat here since at least 1973 and I have doubs as to whether the local DUP organization has developed enough to take out Hermon at this time.)

South Down: SDLP (yes, Sinn Fein made major gains in the 2003 Assembly election, but McGrady was not running in that election and he seems to have a significant personal vote here.  I consider him to be a strong favorite in this election.)

Fermanagh and South Tyrone: Sinn Fein (lack of Unionist unity candidate + growth in the SF vote (2003 notwithstanding) = Gildernew reelected)

Foyle: Sinn Fein (a tough one to call, but I've heard about a "row" Mark Durkin, SDLP's leader and candidate here, got in with another MLA and that the SDLP campaign countrywide is poor, and Nicholas Whyte seems to think that a lot of Hume's vote in 2001 was personal, so I picked SF to take this seat)

Lagan Valley: DUP (I went with the crowd here, since a lot of the contestents probably knew better than I how much of Donaldson's vote in the past was because he was a member of the UUP and how much of it was in spite of it (or at least not because he was a member of that party).  Besides Lord Molyneaux is supporting Donaldson, and I think, as a former MP from that constituency, his support will definitely be helpful.)

East Londonderry (don't like the name I chose to call it? tough! that's the official name of the constituency): DUP (the countrywide winds are definately not blowing the UUP's way and seem very unlikely to do so enough for them to take a seat like this)

Mid Ulster: Sinn Fein (McGinness would have a shot even if his only challenger was from the SDLP and the Unionists and other non-Nationalists came out and voted; as it is, this race is no contest.)

Newry and Armagh: Sinn Fein (all the signs point to an SF takeover here: Mallon not standing; the low SDLP vote here in the 2003 Assembly elections; this not being the only seat the SDLP has to defend, and it being the one with the least chance of success for that party)

Strangford: DUP (The only question here is whether Iris Robinson gets a majority of the vote, although it will also be interesting to see if the UUP vote rebounds slightly from 2003.)

West Tyrone: Sinn Fein (go to http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/awt.htm and scroll down to the Results Table and look at the "2003a" (2003 Assembly election) row - talk about fractured opposition, and the top-polling MLAs from each party besides Alliance, plus Deeney are running; Deeney could possibly break out and get within 20% of Doherty, but anyone getting even as close as 15% seems unlikely.)

Upper Bann: DUP (David Trimble seems to currently be playing a similar roll within Northern Ireland Unionist politics that Tom Dacshle played within American politics in 2003 and 2004, the leader of a party or party caucus which lost its majority in the last election (I'm referring, regarding Northern Ireland, to the 2003 Assembly Election, which actually works well even in Westminster terms since Donaldson defected to the DUP not too long after the latter party's victory in that election) and is trying desperately to bring his party back.  Just as the responsibilities (or at least how Dacshle handled them) of being Minority Leader are credited by many as contributing to his defeat at last November, I imagine many voters in Upper Bann, including some who have voted for Trimble in the past, are getting tired at some of his party's attacks on the DUP.  The fact that a majority of contestents had (and still have) picked the DUP to win this seat was also a factor in my prediction of a DUP gain.)

My predictions for the number of council seats won by each of the five major parties (and all other parties and independents combined) (this will be the tiebreaker if more than one contestant correctly picks the winner in every parlimentary constituency) is as follows:

DUP 158
UUP 133
SF 124
SDLP 106
Alliance 23
Others 38

So far, if I am correct as to how the individual preditions are displayed, only one other contestant so far has picked the same winner in each parlimentary constituency as I, and that contestant's current prediction of the number of council seats won be each party seem far too slanted toward the DUP and against the UUP.  Here they are:

DUP 185
SF 125
UUP 100
SDLP 100
Alliance 28
Others 44

I know it's very likely that other contestents will make the exact same Westminster picks as I before the polls close on May 5, but at this point I feel I have a decent shot of winning.

Kevin
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