Since the boundary changes to certain constituencies this year, the current seat did not exist in the last election five years ago. But many of the voters of the previous constituency, Edinburgh East, will have their say along with the addition of Musselburgh.
Edinburgh East has been held by the SNP’s Tommy Sheppard, who is now running for the new Edinburgh East and Musselburgh seat, since 2015. In 2019, he won the vote decisively with more than 23,000 votes and almost half of the entire vote share.
In a distant second was Scottish Labour’s candidate and former MP Sheila Gilmore, who had held the seat for five years before losing it to Mr Sheppard in 2015. She procured 12,748 votes and a vote share of almost 27%; a steep drop from their vote share of nearly 35% in 2017.
The other contenders struggled to attract a vote share that could challenge either Labour or the SNP. The Scottish Conservatives’ Eleanor Price had 6,549 votes and 13.7% of the vote share, while Jill Reilly for the Scottish Liberal Democrats accrued around half that number with a little over 3,289 nd nearly 7% of the vote share. The Scottish Greens Claire Innes had 2,064 votes and 4.3% of the vote share.
The details of 2019 are shown below.
