On the downside the party barely achieved its self-set target of tripling its share of the African majority vote - from a previously modest 1%-plus. It consolidated its support among white, coloured and Indian racial minority communities, taking votes directly from the ANC. But its support among the African majority, even among the upwardly mobile newly-affluent "black diamond" classes, remains in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. With its urban PR vote at 24%, it may have cracked the racial glass ceiling that restricts its support, but the ceiling remains firmly in place. Future increases, particularly in national and provincial votes, in which the exclusive PR ballot brings the ANC's massive rural support powerfully into play, are unlikely to be of the same order. In rural district councils, the DA polled 15% to the ANC's 70%.

A more significant negative for the DA, at least in the short-term ahead of 2014 parliamentary and provincial legislature elections, is the death of its plans for a grand coalition of opposition forces. The strategy assumed the grand collation would be worth more than the sum of its parts - as demonstrated by the DA's test-run with Patricia de Lille's Independent Democrats (ID) - De Lille was the DAs triumphant candidate in Cape Town.

But much of the DA's success has been at the expense of its putative "grand coalition" partners. As results came in on 19 May DA leader Helen Zille and other party officials did little to hide their anger at the dismal showing by Terror Lekota's Congress of the People (Cope) - targeted as the next step towards the grand coalition. Cope's 2,1% showing crashed DA hopes for DA-Cope-minority party coalitions to displace the ANC in three urban centres, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria and Bloemfontein. The evaporation of Cope support in Port Elizabeth (the Nelson Mandela Metro) was particularly galling: based on Cope's 2009 parliamentary performance there, and widespread traditional ANC voter antagonism to a particularly inept council, DA strategists calculated a coalition could take the council. Zille visited Port Elizabeth six times in the last fortnight of the campaign to maximise DA turnout. Lekota and Cope mayoral candidate, former Mbeki presidential spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, barely registered their presence.

For the DA this translates into a fairly stark message: it is on its own against the ANC. Minority parties may merge or enter coalitions with the DA, but there will be no quantum leap to be had.

Equally importantly, there are no ready-made, high profile black politicians to import into the DA (or grand coalition) leadership: the DA will have to grow its own.

Zille - her African crowd-pulling credentials demonstrably superior to those of the African politician ideologically closest to the DA, Cope's Lekota - will probably serve out her active political life as DA leader during the long gestation period of a new generation of DA-nurtured African leaders. DA strategy over the past decade has partly prepared the party for what might been viewed as this worst-case scenario - having to win African votes in its own right. The strategy unveiled before 18 May is the brainchild of DA strategist Ryan Coetzee, who learnt his opinion research trade under US Democratic Party strategist Doug Schoen. It was Schoen who first opened the party's thinking to the possibility of attracting black votes.

Zille's predecessor, Tony Leon, leader of what was then still the Democratic Party, duly traversed black townships canvassing for black support. But his message was ambiguous his personal image was tarnished - not least by his alliance with the apartheid National Party and his ill-named "fight back" campaign (pilloried as "fight black" even by far-right white separatist opponents).

Zille carried on the attempt, but in 2009 parliamentary elections was inhibited by her instinctively combative style and constant provocation by ANC Youth League president Julius Malema. Malema explained later: "While I distracted Helen Zille, Jacob Zuma sprinted to the Union Buildings." This year-s showing does not represent the tectonic political shift some analysts predicted, but Zille has clearly refined the approach and has incorporated it into her campaigning. This year's campaign included an explicit attempt to attract black voters by appropriating for the DA both the ANC's non-racial legacy and many of its icons. And this time she has been helped, rather than hindered, by Malema, whom she successfully provoked into booming explicitly racial epithets. Research clearly tracks the negative impact of the "Julius factor" among racial minority voters who switched to the DA in 2011.

National elections in 2014 and local council polls in 2016 will definitively establish if the new messaging has persuaded African voters in significant numbers. This year the DA has done little more than lay a solid foundation for those campaigns. With the pickings for credible national, or even regional, African political figures among the minority parties extremely slim, the DA has been actively preparing those young black members in its ranks for eventual leadership. Zille's decision to fast-track the promotion (to party spokesperson) of Lindiwe Mazibuko is the most visible example. It is pushing many of its university level recruits through its leadership academy in preparation for new vacancies in 2014 and 2019. In the shorter term, the next few months may be testing ones for the DA: within days of the 18 May poll, young black first-time DA councillors in Tshwane (Pretoria) reportedly exchanged harsh words veteran white councillors - remnants of the DA's alliance with the New National Party. The ANC, stung by media characterisations of the election as a "defeat", will not be slow to exploit perceived racial tension on the opposition benches. Analysis: What ANC decline? A different view.

By now you might be heartily sick of local government election coverage, or confused by the numbers, or both.

We'll start with the usual provisos, caveats and technical notes, because this whole local government voting is confusing. Voters had to fill in two ballots in the metros and three everywhere else, which led to some reports confusing the number of voters with the number of votes cast. This is an easy mistake to make if you aren't familiar with the IEC's reporting format. In addition, because of the different maths that goes into calculating ward seats and proportional representation seats, the percentage of votes that party X received is not the same percentage of council seats that party X received in a given municipality. Keep these two points in mind, because it only becomes more hairy as the article progresses. (There will be a pop quiz later in the week.) What we set out to do was compare the voting trends for the eight metros and the 19 secondary cities for the last three local elections (2000, 2006, 2011). As mentioned in previous articles, these 27 municipalities are the biggest and richest of them all. They cover about 55% of the national population and 65%+ of national income and spending. We realise they are not the whole story, but they're most of the story. We also focus our analysis on comparing 2011 with 2000, rather than with 2006. We'll tell you why below.

Herewith a brief description of our methodology: We added the ward and PR votes for each party in each municipality to give the total number of votes by party by municipality. To get a rough idea of the number of voters in each party, we divided the number of votes by two. We say "rough" because there are funny little trends in certain areas for certain parties. For example, the IFP historically has received significantly more PR votes than ward votes in certain KZN municipalities. But the quick-and-dirty maths allows us to compare voter numbers in municipal elections (2000, 2006, 2011) with voter numbers in national / provincial elections (2009). You'll soon see why we did this. We haven't controlled for population growth. We could have gone to StatsSA's mid-year population estimates for the 2000-2011 period, compared the growth in age cohorts with the IEC's registered voter numbers (also by age cohort) and interpolated overall population numbers by population group (race). We haven't done that. It's important to keep in mind the separate trend of population growth when looking at the change in voting numbers, but we haven't explicitly stripped this out of the numbers.

The overall voter numbers for the 27 municipalities are: 4.5 million in 2000, 4.9 million in 2006, and 7.3 million in 2011. Incredible, isn't it? There was growth of 8 % in the number of voters between 2000 and 2006 and growth of 48% between 2006 and 2011. What exactly is going on? Basically, the voter response to this election was akin to that in a national / provincial election. Voter turnout was the highest ever for a municipal election. By comparison, 8.9 million people cast a vote for provincial government in the 2009 elections in our 27 municipalities. This spike in the numbers makes it almost impossible to prove or disprove claims such as "the DA only grew by taking votes from smaller parties" (ANC) or "we are making inroads into the black voting bloc" (DA). Here is an example: Approximately 276,000 people voted for the ANC in Cape Town in 2006. In 2009, 411,000 people voted for the ANC, and 366,000 people voted for the ANC in 2011. Did the ANC grow the vote in Cape Town in 2011? Yes, if you compare voting numbers to 2006. No, if you compare them to 2009. We only have comparable data for three local elections and these latest results are the proverbial three-eighths Gripley in the works. Just try to compare apples with apples and watch everything go a bit pear-shaped. We decided to focus on percentage shares of the vote, as opposed to absolute ballots cast for each party. And yes, we know this isn't the same thing as shares of seats in local government. We've cut some corners in adding all votes together and dividing by two, but we believe the margins of error are negligible and the underlying trends come through strongly enough. What are these trends?

Firstly, and most importantly, municipal elections are pretty much a two-horse race and have been so since 2000. Between them, the ANC and DA took 89% of the vote in 2000, 86% in 2006 and 91% in 2011. Throw in the IFP and you've got about 93% of the vote covered in all three elections. Secondly, 2006 was a good year for the ANC and a bad year for the DA. The ANC grew its share of the vote from 58% in 2000 to 61% in 2006, while the DA's share fell from 31% to 25%. In 2011 a reversal of 2006 occurred; the ANC's share fell to 57% and the DA's share grew to 34%. The DA's growth and the ANC's decline in 2011 are significant when you compare 2011 with 2006. But if you compare 2011 with 2000, the differences are much smaller. The ANC fell from 58% in 2000 to 57% in 2011. The DA grew from 31% to 34%. This comparison does support the view of the FF+ that there has been little change over the last decade, with the 2006 results a bit of an anomaly. This is one of the more important trends to us; that if 2000 is used as a basis of comparison, the successes of the DA and the concomitant losses of the ANC become much smaller. If you disaggregate these numbers down to the individual municipality, the story is even more ambiguous. Comparing 2011 to 2000 reveals strong growth for the DA in Nelson Mandela Bay (29% to 40%), Buffalo City (13% to 21%), Mangaung (21% to 29%), Madibeng (11% to 20%) and, of course, in the Western Cape (Cape Town, Drakenstein, Stellenbosch and George). There is respectable growth in Tshwane (35% to 39%) and Govan Mbeki (21% to 25%, but that's where the good-news story peters out. (We're ignoring the Potchefstroom results because of the ANC registration debacle, which effectively handed a few wards and a chunk of the PR vote to the DA on a plate.) The DA grew modestly (by less than 3% of the total vote) in Matjhabeng, Joburg, Emfuleni, Mogale City, Emalahleni, Steve Tshwete, Mbombela and Matlosana. They lost a few points in Ekurhuleni, Sol Plaatje, and Rustenburg, and did poorly across KZN as the ANC continued to make inroads in that province. The ANC's story is largely a mirror image of the DA's (KZN good, Western Cape and Eastern Cape bad) and there are some notable successes for the ANC: its share of Ekurhuleni grew from 57% to 62%, Polokwane's share rose from 75% to 79%, and Rustenburg from 65% to 72%. The DA's notable successes (which are the same as the ANC's losses) are its domination of Western Cape, growth in Nelson Mandela Bay and Mangaung, and regaining of share in Gauteng's metros. Western Cape might provide a foundation for future success in Northern and Eastern Cape, but this isn't a foregone conclusion. It is the number of wards and councils under control that is important, and the DA will be happy with its doubling of the number of councils it now controls outright or as the senior partner in coalition. The ANC has had great success in KZN and a poor show in Western Cape. It has lost significant support in Nelson Mandela Bay and Mangaung, but it hasn't done badly in other areas. With 2006 as a high point for the party, it could have done a lot worse this time, considering its uncoordinated election campaign and the negative effects of the Jimmy Manyis and Bheki Celes and, of course, by its own admission, Julius Malemas on popular opinion. It will be unhappy with the loss of 13-odd councils in Western and Northern Cape, but these losses are mostly pared by the gains in KZN.

We agree with most other commentators the DA campaigned hard and has reaped the rewards in the winning of more councils. But reports of the ANC's demise, to paraphrase Samuel Clemens, are greatly exaggerated.

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