We have a UKIP Thanet District Council but a Conservative MP

For those who enjoy the maths behind the headlines or have been enjoying #thanetrigged I can share with you this extract from a much larger spreadsheet of results.

In the South Thanet parliamentary constituency there are two wards that are part of Dover District Council (by the way Dover are responsible for elections in that area) and fourteen wards as part of Thanet District Council. These two Dover wards have an electorate of over 11,000 people who overwhelmingly vote conservative. The liberal party are the second choice in this area and the Liberals probably split their vote, backing either the Tory or Labour candidates in the general election.

The local election results are published by ward to it is tricky to compare that to the Parliamentary result for various reasons, nevertheless it gives a good overall picture.

Some things that you should know before studying the figures too closely are:

• wards may have 1,2 or 3 seats with voters being able to cast as many votes up to the number of seats.
• voters, however, often did not cast all their votes.
• In some wards the main parties of Labour, UKIP or Conservatives did not stand as many candidates as seats.
• local factors and personalities can swing votes for local councils.

The remaining 57,000 voters in Thanet South cast an large majority of their votes in the Thanet District Council (TDC) local elections for UKIP councillors (36% of all votes), 31% were cast for Tories and 27% for Labour.

If you take the all the votes cast by the South Thanet residents in the local elections you will find the results closely match the result in the South Thanet Parliamentary election.

• 31% UKIP
• 37% Conservative
• 24% Labour
• 8% Others

Which ever party you vote for the figures on a ward by ward basis are useful.

Who defeated Farage? The areas of Little Stour, Ashstone, Sandwich and Broadstairs.

Ramsgate and Margate welcomed the message from UKIP.

Here is the table: I will make the spreadsheet available for others but I’m still working on it.

Electorate for Parliamentary Candidate for SOUTH Thanet – Votes cast by Ward in District Council elections May 2015
District	Ward	Electorate 2015	No of seats	UKIP Votes	CON Votes	LAB Votes	Other Votes	Total Votes
Dover	Little Stour and Ashstone	5,532	3	0	7,199	943	2,044
Dover	Sandwich	5,644	3	1,796	5,488	975	1,855
		11,176	6	1,796	12,687	1,918	3,899	20,300
				9	62	9	19
Thanet	Beacon Road	3,245	2	1,322	1,442	1,366	95
Thanet	Bradstowe	3,229	2	1,306	1,895	1,100	104
Thanet	Central Harbour	5,425	3	3,138	2,062	2,879	1,929
Thanet	Cliffsend and Pegwell	3,723	2	1,870	2,004	873	278
Thanet	Cliftonville East	5,018	3	4,221	3,931	1,828	429
Thanet	Cliftonville West	4,429	3	3,029	1,636	2,408	551
Thanet	Eastcliff	4,819	3	3,090	1698	2,551	985
Thanet	Kingsgate	1,759	1	370	675	227	0
Thanet	Nethercourt	3,390	2	1,773	664	1,377	0
Thanet	Newington	3,186	2	1,729	753	1,441	0
Thanet	Northwood	4,809	3	3909	1,993	2,414	0
Thanet	Sir Moses Montefiore	3,462	2	1,600	1,062	1,536	261
Thanet	St Peters	5,515	3	3,346	4,272	2,694	114
Thanet	Viking	5,397	3	3,027	4,893	2,856	230
	TDC Total	57,406	34	33,730	28,980	25,550	4,976	93,236
exc dover	Vote percent			36	31	27	5
inc dover	total all	68,582	40	35,526	41,667	27,468	8,875	113,536
				31	37	24	8

Of course, in these figures many people had 3 votes, some had 2 and a small number only had one. If you weight them as if everyone had three votes the gap between votes for UKIP and Conservatives becomes wider, 40% and 30%. For the reasons listed above, however, this method of weighting can’t be guaranteed to give us accurate or meaningful information. It could be more revealing to look at individual wards in more detail. I shall do that in future posts.