Target Seats - Greens

by Adrian Worton

We have been using our General Election simulator to study the quality of lists made by parties regarding seats they aim to win in the election, with Labour and the Conservatives already investigated. This time we will look at the list of 12 "Campaigns to Watch" identified by the Green Party.

The Seats on the List

Unsurprisingly, the list features the current sole Green seat, Caroline Lucas' Brighton Pavilion, the retention of which has been repeatedly identified by Greens as the main priority for the party. The other 11 are presumably the seats where the party thinks it has the best chance of victory.

Below is a list of the 12 seats, with the win probabilities for the Greens and their main rivals. The final column ('GRE def') shows how far the Greens are from the favourite for that seat.

As with most other parties, it seems that seats held by the Lib Dems will be the ones most attainable, with Bristol West and Norwich South standing out as the best chances of a Green steal alongside the Labour-held York Central. The remaining 8 seats are all long shots, although with the recent "Green Surge" they certainly shouldn't be discounted just yet.

Speaking of the surge in Green support, we can compare the probabilities for the top four seats to those given in December when we unveiled the model:

Aside from Norwich South, we can see a decent increase in the chance of a Green win in each constituency, which is consistent with the party's rise in popularity across the country. If this rise increases, we might see the Greens move into very strong positions in these areas.

The Seats Not on the List

As with our analysis of the Labour hit-list, we can look at the probabilities of a Green win across all constituencies, and see whether there are some seats which the party has overlooked:

Those listed in green are ones not on the previous list. Three of these, (Lewisham Deptford, Cardiff Central and Hove), are in a similar range to the other long shots in our previous list. However, Hornsey & Wood Green, yet another Lib Dem seat, is marginally higher.

Conclusion

The collapse of Liberal Democrat support across the country has benefited almost every other party, and the Greens are no exception, with nearly all their best chances of adding to their total of MPs being in Lib Dem seats.

As with Labour, we find that our list of the best seats for the Greens to target is not quite the same as the one provided by the party. It won't be known how well the Greens would be doing in these overlooked constituencies had they chosen these in their list of key constituencies, but extra attention from the party would have been unlikely to have harmed their chances.

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