DA leader Helen Zille's party walked away with 59.5% of the Western Cape's provincial vote.
A vote here and a vote there and the Democratic Alliance (DA) could have made it 60% in its home province. Instead it had to settle for 59.5% of the provincial vote, missing out on that particular brag, though it still fared better in the Western Cape than the ANC will in Gauteng.
The DA gained 3.3 percentage points on top of its provincial share in 2009 and that of Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats in that election; the two parties have since merged.
The ANC failed to significantly increase its share of the vote in the province, as it had hoped, but likewise avoided the embarrassing decline the DA would have wished for. Assured of outright victory in every other province, the ANC had to settle for 32.8% of the provincial vote. That is up 1.2 percentage points on 2009.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) came in a distant third at 2.1%, and the ACDP was the only other party to make whole-number percentages, though it was slightly down against five years ago.
The gains of the top three came at the expense of Congress of the People (Cope); the breakaway party was beaten into sixth place by Al Jama-ah, the combined banner under which the Al Jama-ah Community Party and the Africa Muslim Party contested the province.