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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Conservatives win a by-election whilst in government for the first time since 1989
The Tories will be relieved at the hold and only 7.9% down on their General Election score, and better than was expected but an impressive increase for UKIP but still no win, given the momentum they had from the Euros, and polling less in percentage terms than they did in the Eastleigh by-election.
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Milliband = Foot
both saw the return of a Tory government at the next election....
(Only worse performance was in defeat to Galloway)
Blinking hell.
But this was a seat where they started from a very high base (ie 54%).
Most by-elections this Parliament have been in Lab seats where Con started with a low share anyway - so far fewer votes available to lose.
Sore Loser.
A nadir for the LibDems - terminal? They are so out of touch with the electorate that they must consider policy change.
Also spare a thought for those poor deluded Kippers who thought that University of Loughborough was genuine.
Good night everyone, you've been a wonderful audience.
The big question is have they actually got 120,000 plus members remaining in the party to achieve such a campaign turnout?
And those poor Tory MP's 360 visits or thereabouts as well as their own constituency defence not to mention poor old Dave. Nearly 500 visits for him......
As expected then.
Ukip's prospects depend on the major parties' responses over the next few month's. They've been paying lip service since the Euros, but a repeat of the "ignore them, they're racists" line will revitalise the Kipper vote.
The Tories will need a few baubles from Europe and Labour need to carry on pretending that they've taken on board the concerns. For example more furrowed brows from Sadiq Khan.
A test for party discipline.
It is irrelevant that the Conservative Party's share has only marginally improved on previous by elections this term. What will be critical next May is where the awayday Kippers return home. It is hard to believe that this won't disproportionately be to the Tories.
What appears to have happened in the Euro/Locals elections and the subsequent two weeks is a significant toxification of UKIP and a lesser detoxification of the Conservatives. UKIP have become the marmite party attracting a minority but repelling the majority. The Tories could only have achieved the Newark result on the back of tactical voting from previous Labour and Lib Dem voters who are prepared to vote blue to stop the purples.
All this bodes well for the Tories in 2015. Roll on the General Election.
Con 28.0%
UKIP 25.2%
Lab 25.1%
LD 6.2%
The man's a political genius.
But Ukip need a few high profile Euro people to to tell UK where to go (or else Rotherham Childrens' Services to hit the headlines again).
At the last election Labour and the Tories got over 91% of the seats for England - it could quite plausibly be over 95% next time.
There's been almost no TV reporting of Mercer, Yeo and Hancock and about 1000 times less in total than the reporting of Ukip councillors.
edit: so not as much of an achievement as it might seem
the first time Labour have gone backwards in vote share in a seat in which they were second to the Tories (while in government) since Birmingham Northfield, 1982
Again, a Tory victory at the next election.
UKIP are taking over from the Lib Dems - badly. They're getting mid-term by election protest votes like the "Winning Here" party used to. The Lib-Dems actually managed to win many of those though.
Thursday 5th June 2014: Farage well hanged in Newark.
The question is whether they can do enough to win outright on seats, and that's much harder particularly with the smaller parties but by no means impossible. In fact I would put the odds now in favour.
Either way, do you remember when OGH lampooned the person who predicted this as "a pure fantasist"? A week is a long time in politics, let alone a year.
Much talk about Westminster seats they "won" in the Euros - but they won Newark and yet lost today by 19%.
And people are much more willing to protest vote in a by-election than in a GE.
I think UKIP supporters are now going to get that sinking feeling - they now know they have no chance at all of more than one or two GE seats - and the likelihood is they won't win any.
They are, quite simply, wasting their time.
the smallest drop in Tory support in a Tory seat (while in government) since Langbaurgh, 1991
You know the rest...
Almost certainly not, but Ladbrokes' 21-30 seats at 7/2 and 31-40 seats at 7/4 are probably worth a closer look as are Shadsy's odds of 9/4 against UKIP winning between a 5%-10% share of the UK vote.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/former-liverpool-home-battle-atlantic-7225327
Big house - cheap price!
Also, if we're seeing a tactical Lab-Con move then UKIP could get maybe 35% and still not win seats...
I'm surprised that JackW's ARSE, whose opinion I respect, has them winning 3 seats, iirc. Frankly were they to win this many, then they would presumably be close in a number of others and all bets would be off - I just don't see this myself, but who can tell?
- "Labour do not have the enthusiasm and depth of support in the electorate that make them look like an alternative government"
The Yes campaign could not possibly have hoped for a better outcome in Newark. That our country is looking down the barrel of another 5 years of Tory government will start to sharpen a lot of minds.
No 1/7
Yes 4/1
Nigel Farage = Pauline Hanson
2) the Conservative share has barely gone down.
Given that many UKIP voters will be ex-Conservative, we can infer substantial anti-UKIP tactical voting. This is potentially important at the next election in seats where UKIP may feature.
The Conservatives will be justly pleased with this. Labour should be very concerned, for the reasons given by Mike Smithson and John Curtice. The Lib Dems should be kept away from gin and Leonard Cohen records. And as of this morning, there are three wheels on the UKIP bandwagon.
PP
Lab 4/7 (from 2/5)
LD 5/4 (from 7/4)
Grn 20/1
Con 25/1
UKIP 100/1
PP - Twickenham (LD Vince Cable Maj = 12,140)
LD 1/4
Con 5/2
Lab 33/1
UKIP 100/1
Or continuing with this theme - get back in the garage Farage!
It would be interesting to see what would happen in the key marginals should something like the dynamic that occurred in Newark be repeated.
As I have been saying for a while, the Tories have a great opportunity to transfer the toxic tag to UKIP. To sustain this, though, they have to be very careful about the rhetoric they employ between now and the GE. To get any anti-UKIP vote the Tories need to convince those who could lean that way that there is a difference between the parties.
All the movement since 2010 has been away from Con, Lab, LD to UKIP or Others. Mostly UKIP.
Is it because of a general lack of interest, or just maybe because they fear some form of "earthquake" is imminent in terms of polling attitudes?
This is only the third GB by-election this parliament that has not been a LAB defence and EdM’s party should have chucked everything at it. They didn’t and the huge CON campaign clearly convinced anti-UKIP voters that they were the party to stop the purples."
I half agree with that but Mike's still looking too much through the lens of tactical voting and garnering negative support. Elections are not simply about voting Y to stop X. I know that strategy has worked well for the Lib Dems in the past but it should be obvious to anyone where it has left them now those votes lent them out of convenience have gone. Parties need positive support too. Indeed parties need positive support primarily.
The fact is that people in Newark vote Tory because they wanted a Tory, not because they wanted to stop UKIP. There's little evidence of any major Lab- or LD- to Con switching to keep UKIP out. Was any campaigning done on that basis? In any case, with UKIP starting fourth, way behind Labour and the Lib Dems, it shouldn't even have been necessary. To that extent, Mike is right: Labour should have thrown the lot at the election.
It still wouldn't have been enough. A loss of just under 9% is not bad for the Conservatives, particularly given that there minor candidates who didn't stand last time picked up nearly 9% between them (and were always likely to pick up at least 5% or so). As such, Labour would have had a mighty job squeezing the Lib Dems and cutting votes from the Tories, while ensuring that none of the lost Yellow or Blue votes went anywhere but Red.
Perhaps that's one of the main lessons: negative campaigning is now far less effective as a technique than in the past. In a two-party system, vote changes are close to a zero-sum game (abstentions being the only complicating factor). In a four-plus system, there's no guarantee at all that one party's loss is a specific other's gain: Labour started in second but such Con vote loss as there was probably helped push Labour into third.
As for the Lib Dems, Oakeshott was right on at least one point: what on earth are they for? Another lost deposit is only the natural outcome of a party that seems to have lost all sense of positive distinctiveness. Apart from some constitutional changes no-one's that bothered about (well, I am but then I'm a political nerd), what are their key campaigning points? You would think that they really ought to be undergoing some kind of existential crisis but maybe that'll be for this time next year. In the meantime, they're collectively sleepwalking.
1) UKIP drew their support in Newark in a pattern unmatched in those numerous opinion polls; or
2) UKIP drew their support in Newark in roughly the expected pattern, but other voter movements took place in response.
If we take view 2, there was tactical voting against UKIP.
Which should we prefer? It seems to me that 2 is clearly preferable as an interpretation. Evidence in favour of 2 includes the fact that the Lib Dem vote collapsed by nearly 90%. It seems inherently unlikely that the party of muesli and sandals would harbour so many anti-immigrant anti-EU voters. Where did many of those voters go? It seems fairly likely that many of them voted Conservative on this occasion.
What we have seen in the last fortnight through imaginative and effective use of the internet and other media in the Euros to volunteers on the ground in Newark has been genuinely different. These things can be contagious and the pretty young things in Newark with their curry and sex (alleged) is a fantastically different image from a party whose average member was well past retirement age and struggled with a bit of leafleting.
It is of course much easier to focus resources on a single seat than 100 seats in an election but CCO will be very happy with their road testing over the last fortnight.
Labour, on the other hand, should be seriously worried. They were the first major opposition not to win the Euros for a long time, their performance here has been embarrassing and they should be disappointed they did not recover more of the previously lost ground in the locals. They have not replaced Mandelson (admittedly not an easy thing to do).
All of this supports my theory that Labour may well do worse in terms of the efficiency of their vote in 2015 than they did in 2010. The machine that was so good at delivering votes where it really counted is looking a bit rusty and underpowered. Money and spats with the unions may be a part of the reason but the leadership is clearly an issue.
Good result for Con, not bad for UKIP - tho I suspect this will have minimal impact on either's polling.
You may well be right about this, but I am not sure that you can draw such a conclusion from the Newark vote. Labour clearly did not fight the by-election as hard as it could have done. That may well have been a big mistake, but it does not tell us much about the party's ground game. Neither does losing vote share in a very safe Tory seat tell us much about the efficiency of the Labour vote.
1) the Conservatives wanted to win this seat big. Other parties should note the hunger that implies.
2) UKIP had no idea about the margin of the Conservative victory, as demonstrated by its briefings of their estimates of the size of the majority. Their ground game remains weak (as is perhaps to be expected with such a new party).
Radio 2 news headlines at 7am tells me how the Tories have retained the Newark seat but have "seen their majority slashed". UKIP came second again for the xth time and were pleased with that with their vote going up 5x over...
How confusing!
But Labour barely seemed to campaign in the Euros either.
Their local election results were surely disappointing given the point in the electoral cycle.
There is a pattern here of a poorly motivated, poorly led party which is not focussed on the hard work of winning elections in the way that they were in Mandy's day. If the tories can improve their electoral performance incumbency is likely to play even better for them than normal.
I take it they stayed inside the £100k spending cap.....
Farage has a point here about the seat being 258th on their target list. To have a view of winning a couple of dozen seats means they won't win absolutely everything everywhere, so the notion that this is them finished is a Hodges-style embarrassment to those of you propagating it.
Anyway, what is the result? LibDems % share drops by 87%, Labour's by 21%, the Tories 17%. UKIPs grows by 580%. Whilst we know that under FPTP with nonuniform distribution of votes there isn't a straight national trend, you can't deny that its going to throw out some wild results. Again, with the greatest of respect to Rod Crosby and others, comparison to 3 party results is at best going to be inaccurate. The commentariat will now dictate a line that this pops the UKIP bubble and this with their voters going home guarantees a Tory win.
Of course! A vast increase in UKIP voters means others elsewhere will stop being angry at the big three, stop feeling the system doesn't work for them, and just dissapear! Or, perhaps, they won't. The bog three just dropped their % share by large chunks. Under FPTP someone has to win, but its not exactly a ringing endorsement is it? We three parties either respond, or UKIP will continue to explode upwards. It'll make for a fascinating and unpredictable GE......!
"we do know from numerous opinion polls that UKIP normally draw their support disproportionately from former Conservatives (as opposed to former Labour and Lib Dems). "
Not true. UKIP do well with 2010 Con voters, but they also do well with 2010 LD voters.
26% is one of UKIP's better by-election results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_by-elections_(1979–present)#Present_Parliament
However, I now begin to seriously consider the possibility that Labour's national share of the vote will be down on 2010. I note that in Newark the combined Labour and Lib Dem vote share was lower than Labour's 2010 vote share.
A large vote for UKIP in 2015, say ~15% nationwide, would increase the efficiency of the Conservative vote. Thus the Conservatives could win a majority with a lower share of the vote than in 2010, if Labour and the Lib Dems do badly enough.
The swing to Labour in this by-election was a miserable 2.1%. The next election will be very traumatic for the Labour party.
Less than a third of Scottish teenagers eligible to vote in the independence referendum will pick Yes, a major survey has found.
Comparatively more than half of 16- and 17-year-olds will vote to keep Scotland part of the UK, Edinburgh University research found.
The findings suggest that Alex Salmond's decision to expand the franchise to some teenagers for the independence vote has backfired.
In any case, on domestic matters, I thought you'd got an SNP government?
I still find the idea that Miliband could do even worse than Brown hard to credit so I expect a higher turnout for Labour in their safe seats but you could be right.
Meanwhile looks like the SNP whingeing about BBC Scotland is bearing fruit:
As the president’s words emerged yesterday, what was deeply embarrassing was the reaction of BBC Scotland. Having bent over backwards for months in its attempt to steer some kind of middle road on the independence debate, it plumbed astonishing new depths yesterday.
“President Obama has made some comments on Scottish independence,” said the newsreader on its 4pm radio bulletin. Really? Or how about this, 30 minutes later: “ The president has been making remarks about independence.” They were getting really brave by the 5pm bulletins: “The president has been asked about Scottish independence,” was their headline.
We can’t really blame those who read out this sort of guff; somebody probably wrote it for them. But this is a humiliating way for a supposed national broadcaster to handle a huge breaking story.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/active/10879769/Obamas-words-prove-UKs-worth-on-the-world-stage.html
50 or fewer 5/2
51 to 100 4/1
101 to 150 5/2
151 to 200 11/4
Over 200 9/2
So, 151 to 200 lost deposits is the current FAV.
Hmmm... 175 times 500 quid = 87,500 quid = more money the Lib Dems don't have
As half of kippers came from the conservatives (possibly more in Newark as half of all voters were Tory , and hard to see Roger Helmer pulling in Labour or LD voters), there must have been LD and Lab movement to Con. We can only speculate on their motives, some would be tactical but others would be genuine converts. Cameron is hated by the kippers but plays well to the centre ground.
Another disaster for the LDs. Shadsys band of 21-30 at 7/2 looks a good bet.
@Antifrank's analysis I agree with.
Lab/Con got 63% of the vote between them. LibLabCon got 65.5%. You can think that's two party politics if you want.
Those voters don't exist in Newark, or at least are outweighed by votes Labour is losing to UKIP and the Conservatives.
Dan Hodges is going to be insufferably smug in May 2015.
The BBC must tread extremely carefully from now on, as we are now into the 16-week regulated period preceding the poll. Their days as Darling's little helpers are over.