Lagan Valley born and bred, I’ve always coveted the thrill of voting in a marginal constituency like North Down or Foyle. Like many of us in this part of the world, I’ve conducted my electoral labours under the claustrophobic perception that my vote won’t really matter. Not far away in North Antrim, we’ve seen a DUP MP investigated by parliamentary authorities twice in one year and still returned handily. This has long been the way of things – or at least it was until last week’s general election.

 

Big changes in Lagan Valley

For 22 years, the DUP’s Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has been the undisputed king of Lagan Valley – he’s literally held the seat for a length of time not that much shorter than my entire life. For the last six general elections his career at Westminster has never been in doubt, he’s been returned again and again with very comfortable majorities. So, despite the general air of gloom that seemed to fall across Northern Ireland after Boris Johnson’s landslide victory, I found myself to be unreasonably happy on election results morning. Even though the post-Brexit GB-NI regulatory apocalypse now hastens its approach, something new has happened in Lagan Valley, something I had never thought I’d see: Donaldson has had his first taste of real competition.

The DUP earned approximately 19,500 votes in my constituency. Though this meant a substantial victory with 43% of the overall vote, it actually represented a significant departure from Donaldson’s previous average of around 55%. Specifically, in the two years since the last general election Donaldson’s vote share declined by 17 percentage points, and many of the 7,000 votes he lost seem to have gone directly to Alliance. This is not an electoral fluke unique to Lagan Valley, but a trend emerging right across Northern Ireland.

 

A trend emerging across Northern Ireland

Consider the DUP’s other (newly re-elected) Westminster titans: Sammy Wilson (East Antrim), Ian Paisley Jr (North Antrim), Jim Shannon (Strangford) and Gavin Robinson (East Belfast). Each have consistently won substantial majorities. Each are now under a great deal more threat than they had been.

East Belfast was taken to be a safe seat in the run-up to the election, under the assumption that Gavin Robinson had built up enough of a voter-base to withstand Alliance’s Naomi Long. However, a DUP decline of 3,000 votes (-6.6 percentage points) and an Alliance upswing of 3,500 (+8.2 points) left a mere 1,800 votes between the two. The DUP lost about a third of their votes to the UUP, the remaining two-thirds to Alliance. If it wasn’t before, this seat is now very marginal.

In East Antrim, Sammy Wilson experienced a loss of around 5,000 votes (-12 points), whereas Alliance increased its share of votes by 12 percentage points , leaving them now just around 6,500 votes behind.

In Strangford, the days of the UUP-DUP tug-of-war are far behind us. Where once the gap between Jim Shannon and his nearest challenger was around 20,000 votes, last week Alliance narrowed the gap to 7,000.

The North Antrim result is a bit of an anomaly – Ian Paisley Jr’s majority is still over 10,000 votes and it’s the only seat where the UUP out-surged Alliance. Still, Paisley’s vote share decreased by 12 percentage points, most of which seems to have gone to both of those two parties.

 

Is it the end of the DUP’s safe seats?

This was a peculiar election held at a particular moment. The stakes were high, candidates stood down, pacts were struck. Still, we may feel the ramifications of these results for some time to come. We’ve seen Alliance successfully consolidate themselves as a significant electoral force. What’s more, a substantial number of traditionally DUP voters are proving themselves more willing to turn directly to Alliance, rather than the UUP. The soft-unionist demographic is expanding as more unionist voters realise that Brexit, Stormont, the health crisis – these are superseding in importance the usual reasons to vote DUP.

Eyes will soon turn to the next Northern Ireland Assembly election, and with it the single transferable vote (STV) system. Every vote matters with STV – this may hold great peril for the DUP, as it may for Sinn Féin, given their respective results at the polls this time around. As a lifelong Lagan Valley voter, real competition isn’t something I’m used to. Now, the Alliance Party have proven it’s possible to pose a serious challenge to the DUP in one of their safest seats. Whichever party you support, this should come as good news for all of us in Northern Ireland: meaningful competition will leave little room for complacency and give despondent voters the sense that their vote might matter after all.