Gen Kitchen, Labour’s victorious candidate in Wellingborough
Most of us expected Labour to win the Wellingborough by-election but the result was astonishingly bad for the Conservatives, even if exaggerated by the terrible choice of candidate and subsequent refusal by senior Tories to campaign.
It came close to breaking the record for the biggest Conservative to Labour swing of all time – 28.5% - only fractionally beaten by Dudley West in 1994. It is the biggest ever recorded fall in the Conservative vote share. The low turnout almost hides how bad it was for them. In raw numbers the Labour vote is more or less the same as 2019. For the Conservatives it’s fallen 77%.
Kingswood was more normally terrible for the Tories, with a 16.4% swing allowing Labour to win easily. This is in line with what the worst of the current polls for the Tories are suggesting will happen nationally. No silver linings here. The constituency is disappearing at the general election and four of its wards are going to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new seat. On this swing he would lose it and Labour would have a few thousand votes to spare.
As I expected many Conservative pundits have highlighted the rising Reform vote as both the reason for Tory woes and a potential escape route if they can be won back. This is why I wrote my Rise of Reform post on Wednesday. Their performance (10% in Kingswood; 13% in Wellingborough) certainly shows their polling rise is real, but also that the pollsters with the highest Reform numbers are very likely overstating them. At UKIPs’ peak in 2015 they got 15% in Kingswood and 20% in Wellingborough on a 12.5% national vote. So Reform aren’t on 13% nationally. Based on these results 7-8% seems about right, slightly below their polling average, but comfortably enough to cause the Tories a lot of pain.
Most of these voters are not going back to the Tories - however far Sunak’s party try to shift right to accomodate them. The polling I did for Wednesday’s post shows that Reform voters dislike the Tories just as much as other non-Tory voters. On a 0-10 scale 43% said there was absolutely no chance they would vote for them come the general election, and 63% gave an answer of 3 or lower. This was only slightly less than the whole sample of non-Tory voters.
Indeed it seems more likely that Reform will continue to pull voters away from the Conservatives as they get more profile in the light of these performances and further press coverage. There is a distinct overlap between the two groups of voters so it gives an easy way out for those deeply unhappy with the government yet way to the right of Labour on the social axis.
As a final point it’s worth noting that the Green vote rose in Kingswood and stayed solid in Wellingborough, a pattern we’ve seen in some other by-elections. Liberal Democrat and Labour voters seem generally willing to vote for the other to remove the Conservatives, but the Green vote is stickier and less obviously squeezable by the other parties on the centre/left.
This is unlikely to cause Labour many problems in this general election, though it could cost them a few seats at the margins, but it potentially bad news for them in the long run. As James Kanagasooriam of Focaldata said in the Times earlier in this week:
“Our research indicates that there are about seven million voters who are ‘Green-curious’ and have an underlying warmth for the Greens. Of this bloc, only 15 per cent intend to vote Green today and 43 per cent say they will go for Labour.”
Brexit had the rather paradoxical effect of boosting the vote of the two main parties but as that effect fades, and as dissatisfaction with politics grows, we may be starting to see the beginning of a longer-term fragmentation of the vote. For now, though, it is the Tories who are in deep trouble and Labour looking at a landslide.
In the rest of this round-up:
Some thoughts on the cursed by-election in Rochdale and a (very tentative) prediction
I look into a new MRP that shows the Tories going under 100 seats for the first time
A quick analysis of some new polling on tactical voting from Labour Together and YouGov
How much can we use history as a guide to future elections?
The “false recall” issue in polling and how big a problem it could be for the pollsters.
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