Population, 2021 voting patterns and the new electoral geography of The Gambia
By Dr Ebrima Ceesay
The alliance map is now layered over the 2021 map
The political geography of 2026 cannot be understood without acknowledging that the political vehicles have changed. Adama Barrow’s NPP is now operating in alliance with GDC, while the NPP has also entered into a political agreement with APP-Sobeyaa led by Essa Faal.
Ousainu Darboe’s UDP is operating within the Gambia First Coalition, while Talib Bensouda is contesting under Unite and its associated coalition arrangement. This means that comparing 2021 and 2026 involves comparing political formations that are not identical.
That creates an important methodological problem. Suppose a constituency gave Mamma Kandeh 20 per cent in 2021. It would be tempting to add those 20 percentage points to Adama Barrow’s 2021 result and describe the resulting figure as the “new” Barrow vote.
But voters are individuals, not transferable blocks. Some may follow the party. Some may follow the candidate. Some may oppose the alliance. Some may have changed their political preference. Some may not vote. Others may have entered the electorate since 2021.
The same problem applies to the support previously received by Essa Faal and to the organisational strength associated with the parties entering the new alliances. The 2026 political map is therefore not a mathematical addition of the 2021 map. It is a new map built on top of the old one.
A new electorate is also emerging. The 2024 census adds another layer to this calculation. More than 40 per cent of the population was below 15 years old in 2024, while 56.2 per cent was aged 15-64.
That does not mean that 40 per cent of voters are young, because children below voting age are not part of the electorate. But it does tell us that the demographic structure of the country is changing rapidly.
Every election therefore takes place within an electorate that is not completely static. Some younger citizens reach voting age. Some older citizens leave the electorate. People move from rural areas to urban centres. New residents settle in rapidly expanding communities. And political identities can change as economic circumstances and life experiences change.
This is one reason why a 2021 electoral result should be treated as a baseline, not as a permanent political map.
The 2024 census captures the demographic environment in which the 2026 presidential election is occurring. The August 2026 poll provides a snapshot of political sentiment within that environment. Neither should be confused with the other.
The undecided vote matters, but so does the geography of uncertainty. The August poll recorded 17 per cent of respondents as undecided. That is a substantial proportion of the surveyed electorate. But the national undecided figure is only part of the story.
The more interesting question is where uncertainty is concentrated. A constituency where the historical vote was close, the current poll is competitive and a substantial share of voters remains undecided is structurally different from a constituency where the 2021 result was overwhelming and current sentiment remains strongly aligned in the same direction.
This is where constituency-level analysis becomes particularly useful. The purpose is not to label constituencies as “safe,” “swing” or “decided” without adequate evidence.
It is to distinguish between historical certainty – what the 2021 results actually established; demographic weight – how many people now live in the relevant area; and current uncertainty – what the 2026 evidence does and does not tell us. These are three different measurements. They should not be collapsed into one.
What do the 2021 presidential election results still tell us? The passage of five years does not make the 2021 results irrelevant. Quite the opposite. They provide the most comprehensive constituency-level record of actual presidential voting behaviour available before the 2026 presidential election.
They allow us to identify where political competition existed, where one candidate dominated, and where relatively small margins separated the leading candidates. But their proper use is comparative. For example, a constituency in which Ousainu Darboe led Adama Barrow by five percentage points in 2021 should not simply be described as a “Darboe constituency” in 2026.
The appropriate conclusion is narrower: Ousainu Darboe led Adama Barrow there in the 2021 presidential election.
Whether that advantage survived political realignment, demographic change and subsequent political developments is an empirical question for 2026. The same principle applies to Adama Barrow’s strongest constituencies and to areas where Mamma Kandeh performed particularly well.
Three Gambias on one electoral map
The most useful way to think about the 2026 presidential election may therefore be to imagine three maps placed on top of one another.
Map One: The population map: This is the 2024 census. It shows a country of 2.42 million people, heavily concentrated around Brikama and Kanifing, but with substantial populations across the Gambia’s other LGAs. It also shows a youthful population and continuing urbanisation.
Map Two: The voting map: This is the 2021 presidential election. It shows where Adama Barrow, Ousainu Darboe and Mamma Kandeh actually received support, and reveals significant constituency-level differences that disappear when the results are reduced to national percentages.
Map Three: The sentiment map: This is the Gambia Participates August 2026 poll. It provides a snapshot of where the principal candidates stood in the minds of surveyed registered voters four months before polling day. But because it was conducted in late July and early August, it predates subsequent political developments and cannot be treated as a December result.
The interesting question is not which map is “correct”. Each answers a different question. The question is where do the three maps overlap, and where do they diverge?
Where the maps converge: There are several broad areas where the evidence points in the same direction. The first is the growing demographic importance of the Brikama-Kanifing corridor.
The second is the continued political importance of the rural regions despite the Gambia’s rapid urbanisation. The third is the persistence of strong constituency-level differences. And the fourth is that the political map of 2026 cannot simply be reconstructed from the national 2021 result. The Gambia is too geographically diverse for that.
Where the maps diverge: The more revealing story, however, lies in the areas where the maps do not match. A heavily populated area can contain constituencies that voted differently in 2021. A constituency that strongly supported a particular candidate in 2021 can now be operating under a different political alliance.
A region with a distinctive historical political pattern can contain constituencies where the margin was much narrower than the regional reputation suggests. And an August 2026 poll can indicate changing sentiment without telling us whether that change will survive until December. These divergences are not weaknesses in the data. They are the reason the data are useful.
So, where is the upcoming presidential election being decided? There is no responsible way, at this stage, to identify a set of constituencies and declare that they will decide the 5 December 2026 presidential election.
The available evidence does not justify that conclusion. But it does allow us to identify where the analytical attention should be concentrated. The first area is the large urban and peri-urban population belt, particularly Kanifing and Brikama, because of its demographic weight and the evidence of political competition.
The second is the historically competitive constituency belt, where relatively modest changes in support could produce substantially different local outcomes. The third is the stronghold constituencies, where the question is less about whether a historical pattern existed – it clearly did – and more about whether alliances, candidate changes and political developments have altered that pattern.
The fourth is the areas associated with former candidates whose political organisations are now aligned with different presidential campaigns. And the fifth is the new and younger electorate, whose political preferences cannot be read directly from the 2021 map.
These are not predictions. They are areas where the evidence raises questions that the campaign, and ultimately the ballot, will have to answer.
The real significance of the 2026 electoral geography
The biggest mistake in analysing the 2026 presidential election would be to assume that there is one Gambian electorate behaving in one uniform way. There isn’t. There is a national electorate, but it is geographically differentiated.
There are urban and rural populations. There are densely populated and sparsely populated areas. There are constituencies with long-established political patterns and others where competition has historically been much closer.
There are areas where demographic change has been rapid and others where the population structure has changed more slowly. And over all of this sits a political landscape transformed by alliances that did not exist in their current form in 2021.
The 2024 census tells us that the population has changed. The 2021 results tell us that voters have behaved differently from one constituency to another. The August 2026 poll tells us that current political sentiment does not simply reproduce the 2021 national picture.
But none of these datasets, alone or together, can tell us what voters will do on 5 December 2026. That remains a decision for the electorate. What the evidence can tell us is something else.
The 2026 election is being contested on a geographical map that is no longer identical to the map of 2021. The population has moved. The cities have grown. The electorate has changed. Political alliances have been redrawn.
Some old voting patterns remain visible. Others are being tested. And in between them lies the central analytical question of the 2026 presidential election: not simply where people live, and not simply how they voted before, but where demographic change, historical voting behaviour and current political sentiment intersect.
That is the new electoral geography of The Gambia. And understanding it requires looking beyond national percentages – to the constituencies, communities and demographic changes beneath them. The 5th December 2026 presidential election will ultimately produce the answer. Until then, the task of analysis is to understand the map without pretending that the map has already determined the result.
Ebrima Ceesay, is a former Gambian journalist now an academic based in the UK.
