Following a bruising leadership contest, at the end of September the Scottish Conservative Party opted to elevate Russell Findlay MSP to a job described by some commentators as a “poisoned chalice” with an inheritance amounting to a “crisis”. At the 2024 general election the party lost half its previous vote share, dropping to 12.7% from 25.1% in 2019 as outgoing then-leader Douglas Ross lost in his attempt to represent Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. Despite retaining five seats in straight fights with the SNP, the collapse in vote share poses serious challenges ahead of the next Holyrood election scheduled for 2026.
This represents a sharp reversal in fortunes from the Scottish Conservatives’ mini-revival from the mid-2010s. After decades in the doldrums, the party turned a strong pro-union and anti-SNP platform into improved electoral success while the twin constitutional issues of independence and Brexit dominated voter decision-making north of the border. They replaced Labour as the official opposition at Holyrood in 2016 and maintained this position in 2021 even after the departure of their popular modernising leader Baroness Ruth Davidson.
Figure 1 below shows constituency vote shares at Scottish Parliament and UK General Elections in Scotland the three largest parties since 1997. There is a clear multi-level pattern until the time of the 2014 independence referendum, with the SNP doing better (and Labour worse) at Holyrood elections than Westminster contests until 2015, at which point constitutional politics came to the fore. This negatively impacted both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, while the Conservative vote share crept up year on year after 2014, peaking at the 2017 General Election. However, alongside the SNP, the Scottish Conservatives’ performance dropped precipitously in 2024 as voters prioritised a change of government. Indeed, this was the party’s lowest ever share of the vote in Scotland.
Figure 1
Scottish Labour’s weakness after the independence referendum – caught between the two poles of the constitutional debate and not especially liked or disliked across the spectrum – eventually benefitted them in 2024 as the salience of existential questions about nationhood faded and voters tired of incumbents at Westminster and Holyrood. With Labour now in power, it remains to be seen whether Scots who switched to the party looking for a change will stick with them at devolved level. Meanwhile, for the Scottish Conservatives, a lack of competitiveness on the constituency side of the ballot in previous devolved contests and newfound competition on the right of the political spectrum from Reform suggests the party face a battle on multiple fronts at the next Scottish Parliament vote.
Is there anything the Scottish Conservatives can do to change the narrative? In a recent appearance on BBC Scotland’s Podlitical show, leadership contender and Holyrood stalwart Murdo Fraser MSP suggested that the party ought to move on from its heavy focus on the union and present a compelling centre-right case to natural conservatives of all constitutional persuasions. But are there, as Mr. Fraser described them, “Tartan Tories” out there who might be inclined to support his party despite backing independence?
Con-sistently unpopular
Unfortunately for the Scottish Conservatives, the short answer is no, and the long answer isn’t much more complicated than that. The graph below shows how Scottish Election Study respondents in our pre-election survey in June 2024 (administered online by YouGov, n=2,472) answered a “Propensity to Vote” (PTV) question about the Conservatives, split by whether they support independence or not. PTVs are useful because respondents are invited to answer, on a 0-to-10 scale, how likely or unlikely it is that they would ever vote for a party, capturing attitudes beyond any individual election.
It won’t surprise observers of Scottish politics that the Conservatives are unpopular, but the scale of anti-Conservative sentiment on the Yes side is striking. Fully 87% of these voters give the party a 0, indicating they are unlikely to ever vote for them. And the remainder hardly consider themselves more likely to back the party – incredibly, just over 2% of pro-independence SES respondents consider themselves more likely than not to vote Conservative at some point in future.
The party don’t fare well among No supporters either, with 52% of these voters answering below 5. Predictably, those currently undecided on the constitution fall between the two poles of the debate, meaning the overall share of 0s across the whole sample is 59%. Of course, these are respondents evaluating the current Scottish Conservative party, not one seeking to de-emphasize constitutional matters in favour of an alternative economic message. The scale of the challenge is evident, though.
Figure 2
Things don’t improve a great deal when we divide the electorate by ideology. SES respondents ranked themselves on a 0-10 left-right scale, and while this measure is open to interpretation and thus not always a perfect or indeed nuanced representation of underlying beliefs, it is nonetheless important to consider how people identify with these labels. The graph below shows the share of voters at each point on the self-reported left-right scale who support Scottish independence (excluding don’t knows). To put it bluntly, there are almost no self-identified right-wingers who want Scotland to leave the UK. There is a clear linear association between left-right self-perception and indy support, with those furthest to the left backing Yes by a four-to-one margin, while centre-left voters are more evenly split and right-of-centre voters are overwhelmingly No.
Figure 3
It is also worth remembering that left-right views are not evenly distributed across the electorate, and as such each bar represents a different number of people. To illustrate, fully 54% of survey respondents place themselves between a 3 and a 5 on the left-right scale, meaning the centre of political gravity is on the centre-left. Those who place themselves at a 6 on the left-right scale and support independence – potentially those who could fairly be described as “Tartan Tories” by temperament – represent less than 2% of the overall electorate.
We can also examine party PTVs by ideological preference. In Figure 4 below, we place respondents into left (0-4), centre (5) and right (6-10) categories and show the share of these broad ideological groups answering a 0 on the propensity to vote scale for each of the three main parties. The aversion of left wing voters to the Conservatives is almost matched by hostility to the SNP on the right. Once again, we see strong SNP-Conservative polarisation, but Labour not attracting nearly as much opprobrium. Even among self-identified right-of-centre voters in Scotland, only around a third rule out ever voting for Labour – the UK’s main left-of-centre party.
Figure 4
We’re not so different, you and aye
At this point, we have established that there is currently no wellspring of pro-indy voters positively disposed to a centre-right alternative to the SNP. Indeed, Yes supporters looking for an alternative to the nationalists already appear to have found one in Labour, which attracted a similar total number of voters from the SNP and Conservatives in 2024. Below is an alluvial graph showing how SES respondents switched vote choice between the 2019 and 2024 elections, with Conservative 2019 voters highlighted to demonstrate the way their prior supporters scattered to the winds.
Figure 5
While some might be tempted to chalk this up to the distinctiveness of Scottish political attitudes, data from the British Election Study suggest there are similar patterns in both the Scottish and English samples on common survey scales of economic left-right and social liberal-authoritarian values. While Scottish respondents are overall slightly more left wing and liberal than their English counterparts, the gap is not all that big, and much smaller than one would expect given the centre-left consensus at Holyrood. There is clearly a gap in the market for centre-right politics in Scotland, but the continuing importance of constitutional politics and current unpopularity of the Conservative Party and right wing identity makes this difficult to navigate.
Figure 6
There are doubtless tartan centrists and even tartan small-c conservatives out there. But there is no evidence as things stand to suggest these individuals have an interest in supporting the Conservative Party. Their 2017 peak of 28.6% – achieved under very different conditions which the party skilfully turned to their advantage – could come to represent a ceiling on their electoral support. Indeed, for all the discussion of a recovery in Scotland over the last decade, the party never broke the 30% barrier at any election and lost a huge swathe of voters when the UK party’s record in government became voters’ main concern.
A large section of the Scottish electorate is reluctant to ever give the Conservative Party a hearing, including many staunchly pro-union voters. With Reform threatening the Scottish Conservatives from the right and Labour proving able to appeal across constitutional divides, the party face a challenge in reaching out to voters of all constitutional and ideological persuasions. Whether they have much of an opportunity to do so may hinge on the performance of Scotland’s two incumbent governments over the next 18 months – perhaps the UK Conservative Party entering opposition after a decade-and-a-half in office is a blessing in disguise for Scotland’s centre-right.