Is there a word/short phrase for "the most" of something (not necessarily the majority)?

I don't want to use the word "majority" in many contexts because it tends to imply that 50% or more of something has gone one way. However, I don't know a concise way of saying that something has occurred more than any other. Example:

Symbolic of the 'red wall' being broken in this election was seeing Blyth Valley falling to the Conservatives. Ian Levy won ______ of the vote.

Ian Levy won 42.7% of the vote in the constituency, so it seems inappropriate to say "majority". It would be useful to have a word/short phrase to signify that the Conservatives won a greater share of the vote than any other party.

Solution 1:

The result you describe is a consequence not of Ian Levy's vote-count (or share of the vote) per se, but how that compares to those of the other candidates.

Ian Levy won the most votes.

Ian Levy won the greatest share of the vote.

Solution 2:

The technical term is plurality, meaning per the OED

The fact of having the largest share of the votes cast, when this is less than an absolute majority.

This word is used primarily in the United States. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic, relative majority is preferred in the United Kingdom.

Solution 3:

You may choose to use the phrase Lion's Share

The lion's share is a phrase which refers to the major share of something.

So in the example sentence that you have shared

Symbolic of the 'red wall' being broken in this election was seeing Blyth Valley falling to the Conservatives. Ian Levy won the lion's share of the vote.

Solution 4:

If you want to be both precise and widely understood, I'd use a phrase, not a word:

Ian Levy won more votes than anyone else.

That's specifically comparing his votes to each other candidates' votes individually, not taken as a whole.  (The latter would of course need an absolute majority, and you could then say that he won more votes than everyone else.)

That phrasing can be extended to a party's results: you could say that they won more votes than any other party.

Solution 5:

In statistics, the technical term for that is the mode:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

It's simply stated the value that occured the most, regardless of whether or not it was an absolute majority (which I believe is the term for "more than 50%")