23AUG

Craig wins Manchester in its first second round

2 min read

19:09UTC

Bev Craig led the first count by 26 points and still could not win outright. Second preferences carried her to 66.3% against Reform UK's Sian Astley.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

Craig needed transfers to win Greater Manchester on the lowest turnout the mayoralty has recorded.

Bev Craig was elected Mayor of Greater Manchester on 30 July 2026, taking 251,449 first preferences, 47.1% of the ballots cast, with the declaration made the following day ¹. Craig led the first count by 26 points and still fell short of half the vote. That sent the contest to a second round, the first in the mayoralty's history. Second preferences lifted her to 309,525, or 66.3%, against Sian Astley of Reform UK on 157,178 (33.7%).

Craig, standing for Labour and Co-operative, replaces Andy Burnham, who forfeited the office on entering the Commons at Makerfield and Downing Street a month later . Paul Dennett, the deputy named in statute to step in when a mayor leaves mid-term, ran the combined authority in the gap. Craig holds the mayoralty only to the scheduled 2028 election, so this fills a vacancy rather than opening a term.

Of 169,949 votes cast for the five eliminated candidates, 103,326 carried a usable second preference and 66,623 did not. Craig picked up 58,076 of those, Astley 45,250. Behind the top two, the Green Party came third on 64,968, Restore Britain took 46,289 and beat the Conservative Party into fifth on 41,021, with the Liberal Democrats on 14,702 and an independent on 2,969 ². Rupert Lowe's party has now finished ahead of the Conservatives in a mayoral contest at its first attempt.

Reform's 21.0% first-preference share sits two to three points under its national polling, and the tempting reading is that the Burnham effect has reached the ground. Turnout undercuts that. Only 538,659 of 2,142,779 electors voted, 25.1%, down from 32% in 2024 and the lowest the mayoralty has recorded ³. Three in four electors in Labour's strongest English city-region stayed at home, so the result measures machine strength in Greater Manchester rather than national mood. The 21.0% will be quoted as though it measured both.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Greater Manchester's mayor oversees transport, policing funding and housing across the region's ten boroughs from a base in Manchester. Since June 2026 these races use the Supplementary Vote: you pick a first-choice candidate and, if you want, a second choice too. If nobody wins outright on first choices, the two leading candidates go through to a second count, and anyone else's second-choice votes for those two are added in. That is what happened here. Bev Craig led on first preferences but without a majority, so Reform UK's Sian Astley stayed in for the second count, and voters who had backed other candidates first helped settle the final result.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The Supplementary Vote allows only a first and second preference, not a full ranking, so any voter whose top two choices are both eliminated in round one is exhausted rather than redistributed. That structural limit, distinct from full preferential systems like the Alternative Vote, means Craig's 66.3% final-round share reflects transfers from only the candidates knocked out after round one, not the full field.

A four-way split to the right of Labour, Reform UK, Restore Britain, the Conservatives and a fragmented remainder, meant no single challenger could consolidate the anti-Labour vote even with transfers, the same mechanical pattern now shaping the 13 August Clacton by-election ballot .

What could happen next?

Meaning
Labour holding Greater Manchester despite a fragmented five-party field shows the Supplementary Vote's transfer mechanism can absorb a divided anti-Reform vote without producing an upset.
Immediate · Assessed
Precedent
The result becomes a reference case ahead of the 2027 unitary authority elections for whether transfers reliably contain Reform's ceiling in mixed fields.
Medium term · Reported
Risk
Turnout of 25.1%, the lowest on record for the mayoralty, raises questions about the democratic weight of the result if repeated at the next scheduled contest.
Long term · Reported

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from Ireland

Ireland

LeftRight

Primary parallel: The Supplementary Vote elected every London mayor from 2000 until the Elections Act 2022 replaced it with First Past the Post for the 2021 contest onward; its 2026 restoration under the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act reverses that single change rather than introducing something untested.

Counter-parallel: Sadiq Khan won the 2021 London mayoralty outright under First Past the Post with under 40% of the vote and no transfer round at all, the opposite mechanism producing a comparable margin of legitimacy debate in reverse.

Consensus view: The Electoral Reform Society has long argued first-past-the-post understates second-preference sentiment in fragmented fields; Craig's jump from 47.1% of first preferences to 66.3% after transfers is the scale of swing the society cites as evidence that single-round systems misrepresent majority preference once more than three serious candidates stand.

Counter-view: Transfers reward second-choice consolidation rather than genuine first-choice popularity; on that reading, Astley's 21.0% first-preference score, not her 33.7% final round, is the truer measure of Reform's Greater Manchester base.

Key tension: Whether a result built on transfers from a 25.1% turnout, down from 32% in 2024, carries the same legitimacy as an outright first-round majority.

First Reported In

Update #14 · Bev Craig wins under a revived voting system

Greater Manchester Combined Authority· 3 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

How English mayors got the transfer vote back

The Supplementary Vote's restoration is what sent the Greater Manchester count to a second round.

Occurred 29 Apr 2026

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Burnham storms back to win Makerfield

Burnham's move to the Commons at Makerfield vacated the Greater Manchester mayoralty Craig has now won.

Occurred 18 Jun 2026

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Burnham builds a cabinet of his own

Burnham's move into the premiership completed the vacancy Craig's election filled.

Occurred 23 Jul 2026

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This Event

Craig wins Manchester in its first second round

The first Greater Manchester mayoral contest to go to transfers, and the first test of how Reform UK performs when second choices decide the result.

Led to

Craig puts £20m into high streets

Craig's fund launch follows directly from her 30 July election as mayor.

Occurred 10 Aug 2026

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Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.