North Antrim.

North Antrim sits in the north-east corner of Northern Ireland, a constituency of around 103,830 people drawn together from a spread of small towns and rural country rather than any single dominant centre. The median age, at 41, runs slightly older than the United Kingdom as a whole, consistent with a seat weighted toward established market towns and farming hinterland. Local services are split across two district councils -- Mid and East Antrim, which supplies seventeen of the seat's wards, and Causeway Coast and Glens, which supplies thirteen. A seat divided between two authorities of this kind tends to face them as much as a single town hall, and that division is itself a defining feature of the place.

The seat's politics are an internal unionist contest rather than a cross-community one. At the 2024 general election Traditional Unionist Voice took the seat on 28.3 per cent, edging the Democratic Unionist Party on 27.2 per cent -- a margin of barely a point. That result marked a sharp turn from 2019, when the DUP carried the seat comfortably on 47.4 per cent, with the Ulster Unionist Party a distant second on 18.5. No recent ward-election results are on record for the two councils, so the local-government direction-of-travel cannot be read with any confidence here. Jim Allister, returned for Traditional Unionist Voice in July 2024, holds the seat on that narrow plurality.

The standing position, then, is one of genuine contest rather than settled allegiance: a single-point gap between the two leading unionist parties leaves the seat finely balanced on the figures available. Recent local reporting has had a broadly civic, administrative character -- council facilities, community initiatives and heritage matters -- with little to suggest a high national profile in recent months. The collapse of a once-large DUP lead into a knife-edge result points to a unionist vote in flux, with the balance between the rival parties unsettled rather than resolved.