Welsh Senedd Election · 7 May 2026

The result — and how the quiz compared

Plaid Cymru are the largest party in the Senedd for the first time, with Reform UK arriving in second. Below: the official seat breakdown, then how FindYour.Party quiz‑takers actually answered — which party won the most quizzes, and which had the broadest appeal across every question.

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Official Senedd 2026 result

96 seats in the expanded chamber. Plaid Cymru emerged as the largest party for the first time, while Reform UK entered the Senedd from zero.

Headline Plaid Cymru finishes first with 43 seats, ahead of Reform UK on 34 — but 49 are needed for a majority, so the next government will be a coalition. Welsh Labour collapses to 9, its worst result since devolution.

Plaid Cymru
43 +20
Reform UK
34 +34
Welsh Labour
9 −35
Welsh Conservatives
7 −22
Wales Green Party
2 +2
Welsh Lib Dems
1 +1

How quiz‑takers aligned

Two metrics per party. Won the quiz is the share of quizzes where that party finished top. Avg alignment is the average score quiz‑takers gave that party across every answer — capturing secondary appeal even when a party didn't win outright.

Won most quizzes
Highest avg alignment
Broadest appeal vs. wins
Won the quiz Avg alignment across all answers

Why the result differs from the quiz

The headline gap is striking: quiz‑takers most often aligned with the Welsh Conservatives, and Reform finished fifth in the quiz — yet on polling day Plaid Cymru topped the table and Reform came second. A few things are likely going on.

Tactical voting against Reform

Plaid pitched themselves explicitly as the way to stop Reform, and the message appears to have landed. Many voters whose first‑preference policies sit elsewhere may still have backed Plaid to block a Reform‑led government — a vote against, not for.

Labour's collapse needed somewhere to go

Welsh Labour lost 35 seats overnight. Those former Labour voters didn't vanish: some shifted to Plaid (often as the anti‑Reform option), some moved to Reform themselves, and others stayed home — scrambling the prior‑election baseline.

Alignment is not the same as a vote

The quiz measures which manifesto your answers most resemble. The ballot box also captures tactical considerations, party loyalty, candidate trust and local issues. Someone whose policy preferences look Conservative on paper may still vote Plaid for any of those.

Quiz‑takers aren't a representative sample

FindYour.Party visitors are self‑selected — online, politically curious, and willing to sit through 35 questions. That's not a polling sample of the wider Welsh electorate, and the demographics likely skew differently from the average voter on Thursday.

None of this is a flaw in the quiz — it's the difference between which manifesto fits you best and which party you actually choose to back. In a polarising election those two answers can diverge sharply.

Most decisive issues

The questions where quiz‑takers showed the clearest preference — ranked by how dominant the most-picked answer was.

Show all 35 questions, with every party's share
Take the quiz → ← All elections