Quote:
Originally Posted by bitontheslide
it's going to effectively be a "who do you believe" referendum between the two leaders. It makes sense to me because TS was saying nationalist won't vote for anyone other than the snp, now they have a choice
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I honestly doubt it will meaningfully split the vote in a traditional sense, we've seen quite clearly how "new parties" perform in recent UK elections... the fact is, despite how it may sometimes seem online, most people are just not engaged enough in politics to do much more than go along out of duty and click a box based on their vague leanings. Your average Scottish voter is not paying all that much attention to the Sturgeon/Salmond spat.
What might make it more impactful/interesting though is that Scottish Parliament elections don't use pure First Past The Post, they use mixed-member Proportional Respresentation which means there may well be an "Alba presence" in the resulting parliament even IF most people don't switch their main vote. We vote on two separate things; a FPTP constituent vote and also a PR "regional member" vote, in that second vote the representatives are divided up based on vote percentage (so pretending there are only the two parties - even if SNP tak 60% of the vote, Alba still gets the other 40% of the seats for that region as elected representatives).
If there is a significant effect there there are two considerations. #1, it could damage the SNP's chances of getting a full majority because forming a majority government under a system that includes PR is difficult at the best of times. That could damage the case for independence. But #2, there are now TWO pro-indy parties to choose from which could mean an overall
higher proportion of MSP's who are "pro indy" - even if it erodes the number of SNP reps.
In theory I'm not against there being two pro-indy parties in Scotland, it makes things interesting in a sense, BUT I'm fairly disgusted that the new one is being headed up by a pawing pervert ("allegedly"
) with a stink of Russian ties on him to boot. Sigh. It's just depressing that anyone would vote for him at all, the handsy toad.