I thought I'd give myself a few days to digest the election results before commenting, because my initial gut reaction was rage. Into Thursday evening the rage gave way to depression which lasted well into the night. This was part of the reason I stopped updating the site with the results as they came in (although a couple of pints helped make me feel better).

So what happened exactly? It looks like the DUP's scare tactics were a success, with many candidates reporting that they were hearing "but we don't want a Sinn Fein First Minister" on the doorsteps. It sickens me that the unionist electorate are so content at being blackmailed like this.

We kept being told through the campaign that this election would be about bread-and-butter issues. In fact yesterday, after most of the votes were counted, Tony Blair was still keeping up this pretence, saying "The issues were amazingly, in a sense hearteningly enough, water rates, health, education and the economy and so on." What election was he watching exactly? Perhaps Tony could answer me as to why, if this election was about bread-and-butter issues, that the party who topped the poll (and increased their vote on last time out) spent the first half of their 64-page manifesto spouting macho bullshit about how much tougher they were with Sinn Fein and the IRA than their unionist colleagues? Didn't think so.

Follow up:

For further evidence that these elections are just a contest to 'stick one to themmuns' we only need to look to South Antrim, where both the top two candidates (in terms of first preference votes) are blow-ins who had up until recently been contesting the Mid-Ulster seat and as far as I know are still living there.

As far as the middle ground goes, the Alliance did well winning one extra seat and the Greens won their first seat in North Down, however the SDLP lost 2 seats, which in itself is enough to redress this good news. Added to this is the fact that the Ulster Unionists' vote collapsed (although didn't quite meltdown as it initially looked they might).

In retrospect, the Ulster Unionists made a lot of mistakes in the election. Basil McCrea (elected to Lagan Valley) has already said there needs to be a major shift in 'strategy' if the party is to avoid being consigned to history. The first mistake discussed even on Thursday as the first few counts were being done, was vote management, described by Ulster Unionist MP Lady Sylvia Hermon as "woeful." Here in Belfast South they fielded 3 candidates, but only managed to get one elected. Based on the last Westminster and last Assembly elections they were never going to be able to get three candidates elected; it would have been reasonable to predict 25% of the first preference vote which, based on the SDLP's 26%, would have allowed them to get 2 candidates elected. They also had no plan on how to distribute first preference votes. On my street there would be UUP posters on three consecutive lamp-posts; the first adorned "McGimpsey 1", the next lamp-post said "Birney 1" and the third one "Stoker 1".

The other major mistake the Ulster Unionists made, as far as I can tell, was falling for the media line that this election was about everyday or "bread-and-butter" (I'm starting to hate that cliché) issues. The voters either weren't interested in these issues, saw them as an afterthought to the macho posturing or the party failed to make them interested. I'm not sure which, but I'd imagine an element of all three featured. Sadly, one thing the Ulster Unionists have never been very adept at is selling their vision to the voters.

There are large numbers of would-be unionist voters who will never vote for the DUP (at the very least as long as Paisley is in charge) but they don't seem to be voting for the Ulster Unionists – with the lower turnout in unionist areas it's a fair bet a number or staying at home, but my guess is that others, perhaps deciding that the constitutional question is settled, are switching their allegiance to the Alliance Party. Indeed I'd consider this myself (and have voted Alliance in the past) if it wasn't for their policy of abolishing grammar schools, lack of opposition to the Maze stadium and generally policies that seem overly simplistic.

So where does this leave the Ulster Unionists, besides lucky to not be reduced to the fourth largest party? The honest answer is I don't know. At this time they're neither distinguishing themselves from the DUP, nor out-doing them. They're just kind of there in the background. They did try to differentiate themselves by saying they would definitely form an executive on 26th March and by focusing on issues like health (free prescriptions etc), education, economics etc in their manifesto but either they didn't drive the message home hard enough or the electorate were more interested in beating nationalists.

Maybe the d'Hondt system doesn't help with that, because when you're voting you know that even if your party wins they can only implement the policies for the departments they opt to run.

I suppose the UUP were always up against it with the DUP so easily able to manipulate Unionist fears about Sinn Fein's rise. The truth is the DUP and Sinn Fein feed off each other. The BBC showed some interesting graphs illustrating the parties' rises since 1998 and they're almost perfectly synched. They seem to manage this by virtue of each painting the other as bogeymen to be feared and/or defeated – and year after year more voters are buying it. The question is how to stop the rot?