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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Just 4,000 of Rochester’s 70k+ electors took part in in the Tory primary which looks like an expensive mistake
The reported turnout of 4000 in the Rochester Tory primary is a disaster for the party given the efforts put into it pic.twitter.com/bPJAMgYGHq
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coo ca choo
When they are 22 points behind UKIP and when its clear both UKIP and the Tories are going to spend close to the limit on the election?
I imagine Labour have better things to do than spend close on 100k only to come in 3rd especially when a UKIP victory does possibly more damage to the Tories than a Labour victory would
elizabethwarrenwiki.org
If there were any pressure at all on Miliband, Labour would be trying, hard. They're not because he and they feel they can afford to lose this one. A third place finish, even a distant one, won't impact his position in the slightest. Other things may, and he's certainly not secure, but Rochester won't affect him at all.
As for Cameron, at least 100 MP's would vote against him, they need 152 to get rid of him, that is doable if the other contenders and heavyweights (cabinet ministers, London Mayor, ect) decide to replace him.
If he is replaced, I expect a transitional figure to take over to try to patch things up a bit with UKIP until the other contenders feel ready (that is why I feel that David Davis could be that transitional leader).
Who in the Tory party has the energy, balls and connection with the public to make some bold policy choices - EU exit? - which will actually be LISTENED to and TRUSTED by the public?
The answer is there isn't anybody, because no mainstream politicians are much trusted by the public anymore. Large swathes of the country have stopped listening.
There won't be 46 names.
2010 figures:
R&S: 73,882
Gosport: 72,720
Totnes: 67,937
Of course if the Tories poll rating slumped as a result of Rochester and subsequent events that would be a different story......
UKIP's @JohnBickleyUKIP will be on ITV Granada's Party People tonight at 11.40. Tune in if you can!
Possibly, but I would have thought if people were in any way interested in voting Tory then a higher proportion would have filled in the form even if the two Tory candidates were pretty similar.
Gordon Brown contemplated an election just months after he became PM, unfortunately for him he didn't call it early enough.
If he is replaced, I expect a transitional figure to take over to try to patch things up a bit with UKIP until the other contenders feel ready (that is why I feel that David Davis could be that transitional leader).
UKIP will let no 'patching up' happen. What is in it for them? If they win R&S convincingly they will be riding the crest of a wave and aiming for a few seats in May, and ultimately having some sort of influence in Parliament. Their whole appeal is being outside the Establishment so Farage is not going to do anything that looks like collusion with the Tories, especially seeing as he's now gunning for a few northern Labour seats.
The Tories would be advised to unite behind Cameron and bang on about the economy: do you want us or Labour in charge of it?
Tories are already polling John Major levels.
It's a dead end for the Tory party.
That's the problem with ramping such things when they do not live up to expectations, the level of failure is greatly amplified.
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By comparison with low turn-out in Rochester Conservative primary, 16,497 people voted in Totnes Tory primary in 2009 and 12,659 in Gosport
Those were lower key events and as close to the GE as now, plus they were close to the actual vote count on election day, so they can be compared with Rochester.
If the tories ditch Cameron Farage will have almost destroyed them and made himself king of the right.
A significant rump would jump to UKIP or do deals with UKIP for Farage not to run a candidate against them. They would then owe Farage and not any new leader.
The rest would be a traumatised mess. The new leader would find himself heading up people who are either totally demoralised or who look to someone else as their real leader.
Not all that concerned or surprised at the low turnout. Too quick, it needed more time for voters to get a feeling that they know or understand the candidates. They were too similar, so if there is no significant difference why bother to vote.
A pity it wasn't a higher turnout as the principle is good,.
That is why the Tory party is doing so badly "we don't care if the party base and the parliamentary party is disintegrating, Miliband sucks and Cameron is popular with Nick Clegg followers"
http://www.catholicreview.org/article/faith/our-faith/vatican-ruling-on-mormon-baptism-clarifies-catholic-practice
There doesn't seem to be any enthusiasm for either of them.
Comparisons with Foot however soon falter. Foot wasn't really the problem. The lunatics had really taken over his Party, and there was little he could do about it.
It's somewhat the reverse with Miliband and the Party. If Labour does win the election, it will be because of the Party, not the Leader.
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/conservative-by-election-candidate-revealed-25826/
It no longer represents the very people it was established to represent.
New Labour won Labour three elections but ultimately killed it as a political force, just as Thatch won the Cons three elections and killed it as an electable party in great swathes of the country.
Two parties on their last legs.
Who's going to take over from Cameron? Whoever it is and it won't be any of the main candidates likely would be nowhere near as familiar as Brown was and the circumstances would be chaotic and likely divisive? Not only that but by the time they had got it sorted there would be little more than four months left before the election (discounting Xmas season and the post Christmas national depression of January)
Beyond that you seem to forget that the Tories are part of a coalition. How will the Libdems react? We could have a fabricated situation in January or February where the Libdems withdraw their support for the government and unite with Labour in a vote of no confidence forcing the election early simply because the Tories will be all over the place. 18 months ago the Tories could have done it fairly straightforwardly. 12 months ago they could have got away with it. In late November it would be a disaster.
Certainly it's a good hand for an opposition leader just one election after their party lost power, but even then one could argue that Wilson in '74 or Thatcher in '79 were in better positions.
Its a formal Royal Naval Dock Town. So big chunk of skilled working class heritage from an historical employer (RN & MOD) that is likely to see them leaning further right than most.
In other words, typical electorate that came over firmly to Thatcher in 1979. And pretty fertile UKIP territory I would have thought.
I don;t know why some thought it was far less winnable than Clacton.
Since the universal franchise came in, the Tories have successfully (and in a way surprisingly) escaped ruin by moving from the party of the rich rentiers and landowners to a coalition of the rich rentiers & landowners and the aspiring skilled working and lower middle class. The tiny number of the former provided the finance and the large number of the latter provided the votes.
Thatcher expanded that coalition with right to buy etc.
Cameron has destroyed it. Fearing that this coalition was no longer large enough he persued leftish policies designed to attract the bien pensant Labour and Libdem voting middle classes, based on a calculation that anyone who didn't agree had nowhere else to go and, indeed, could have their noses rubbed in it to impress the guardian, independent and times readers.
Well, guess what, the bien pensant middle class don't want to know and the aspiring skilled working and lower middle class are making it very obvious that they do have somewhere else to go, thank you very much.
So that leaves them heading the same way as the Liberals in the 1920s after the unskilled working class went over to Labour.
What a bunch of prunes. No need for a crystal ball to see the tories future, a chat with Lord Trimble will I'm sure do.
Conservative Party votes:
1979: 13.7 million
1983: 13.01 mil
1987: 13.74 mil
1992: 14.09 mil
1997: 9.6 mil
2001: 8.3 mil
2005: 8.7 mil
2010: 10.7 mil
Labour Party votes
1992: 11.56 million
1997: 13.52 mil
2001: 10.72 mil
2005: 9.55 mil
2010: 8.61 mil
http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/RP12-43/uk-election-statistics-19182012
Have to say with the Tories in turmoil an Ed is crap average lead of just 2% in the polls this week is very disappointing
So the number of ballots returned suggests that the chance of the Tories out-performing the opinion polls performed to date is nil - under the assumption that Totnes and Gosport are a reasonable precedent.
Compared to the 24.6% for the Conservatives in Clacton, 30% in Rochester would only be a very marginal improvement. Would Ashcroft have the results from a Rochester poll by Monday if it started fieldwork tomorrow?
4000 meant they COULD NOT WIN
I make it now that on a
33% turnout Tories would get 37%
40% turnout 31%
50% turnout 25%
When there are so many unprecedented factors at play everyone can fool themselves into believing everything might pan out okay because there's no direct precedent to tell them otherwise.
So, it's the status quo until GE2015.
Not a vote of no confidence. If one of those occurs and no new government is formed within a fortnight then an election is triggered.
Not that is matters, since the LDs aren't exactly going to vote with Labour to trigger an early election.
I know its fashionable to claim that people are voting for an individual, but in reality many aren't.
Many vote for a rosette and the broad notion of what is for or against.
UKIP to win by less than 5% is my unscientific hunch.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/market?marketId=1.101416490
I thought open primaries were for super-safe seats where one party was guaranteed to win, so the MP was effectively chosen by a tiny electorate of members, or worse, a committee.
Rochester and Strood was always a marginal, changed hands at the last election and any one from three could win this time.
No need for a primary at all.
The people of London voted for him to be Mayor.
In 2008 and in 2012.
He has acted competently.
Not bothered in the primary, implies not bothered in the by-election.
It was a massive mistake to have two such similar candidates in the primary. There were three candidates in Totnes and four in Gosport.
Sending the same leaflet through everyone's door thrice, and offering a choice between nigh-identical candidates who debated at one badly-advertised town hall meeting does not a democratic process make.
The Guardian's John Harris wrote a piece today about mass immigrations effect on the working class
I agree with almost all of it, probably because it is what I have been saying on here for two or three years, and his conclusion is why I don't vote Labour anymore
"This year I visited Wisbech – where a third of the 30,000 population is now estimated to be from overseas – and what was happening there spoke loud truths about why free movement has become so politicised. For all that recently arrived families have started to settle, and their children are acquiring new, hybrid identities, there are still glaring problems. Young men from eastern Europe often live four or five to a room, and work impossibly long hours; with echoes of Europe’s macroeconomic asymmetries, the local labour market is divided between insufficient jobs that be can be done by people with families and mortgages, and a surfeit of opportunities for those who will work whenever they are required for a relative pittance.
This creates endless tension. There have also been inevitable problems surrounding how far schools and doctors’ surgeries have been stretched. Is anyone surprised? Moreover, even if such places represent socioeconomic extremes, similar problems surface whenever large-scale migration fuses with the more precarious parts of the economy. In modern Britain, this obviously happens often, and the under-reported consequences of austerity have hardly helped.
What passes for the modern left tends to be far too blase about all this. Perhaps those who reduce people’s worries and fears to mere bigotry should go back to first principles, and consider whether, in such laissez-faire conditions, free movement has been of most benefit to capital or labour. They might also think about the dread spectacle of people from upscale London postcodes passing judgment on people who experience large-scale migration as something real?"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/22/wisbech-immigration-politicians-david-cameron-ukip-eu-exit
However, Sarah Wollaston had a primary turnout of c80% of her actual election vote while Caroline Dineage was closer to 50%. Both were the forerunner to a probable change of government in a full on General Election.
Is 5600 equivalent to 80% or 50%? Or maybe neither because it's just a by-election?
This is another free hit at the government because Ed will still be in opposition the day after the vote.
The big story here would be Ed winning, not the Tories losing or UKIP winning. That would tell us a new government was coming.
Instead, I think the result is likely to reinforce the message that we're heading for another hung parliament, and probably a more precarious one than the current one.