Winner in 2019: Martin Docherty-Hughes (SNP)
THE eve-of-election Savanta poll showing a three-point SNP lead in Scotland will have provided a timely boost for Martin Docherty-Hughes, the SNP candidate for West Dunbartonshire.
He is one of a huge number of SNP candidates in the Central Belt defending winning margins over Labour from 2019 that were in the low 20s in percentage terms – which has become a sort of nightmare zone in this campaign, with poll after poll suggesting it will not quite be enough to hold off the Labour challenge if there is a uniform swing.
That will have left him wondering whether there is anything he and his local team can do to outperform national trends, but the Savanta poll for the first time serves up a scenario in which he, and other SNP hopefuls in the same boat, could have something approaching a 50/50 chance of winning through.
The SNP will certainly feel that Docherty-Hughes’s constituency is precisely the sort they ought to be winning, even in a more challenging year such as this one, because West Dunbartonshire was famously one of only four local authority areas in Scotland that voted in favour of independence at the 2014 referendum.
But that factor hasn’t proved enough to stop the partly overlapping Scottish Parliament constituency of Dumbarton remaining stubbornly in the hands of Labour’s Jackie Baillie (above) since the indyref.
Indeed, it’s one of only two constituencies Labour currently hold anywhere in Scotland at Holyrood level, and even in 2021 when the SNP won an unprecedented 48% of the national vote, Baillie increased her own vote share by six points and secured a modest net swing against the SNP.
An even more recent warning sign for Docherty-Hughes came only three weeks ago when a local government by-election was held in the Clydebank Central ward within his own seat, and produced a 12-point swing from SNP to Labour – consistent with a somewhat higher national Labour lead than implied by most polls.
The turnout was abysmally low at only 24%, and it’s possible that Labour voters were slightly more motivated than SNP voters to make the trek to the polling stations, in a way that will not necessarily be repeated in today’s much more important vote.
But at the very least there was no indication in that result that the SNP are faring better in West Dunbartonshire than they are elsewhere in Scotland.
Nevertheless, a JL Partners constituency-level projection a few days ago showed Docherty-Hughes was in a virtual coin-toss scrap, with Labour ahead of him by only 41% to 39%.
And with the subsequent national boost from the Savanta poll, hopes will remain reasonably high that by tomorrow the people of West Dunbartonshire may still have an MP who reflects their pro-independence views.
