Amidst an absolutely torrid set of results for the Conservatives, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how much worse it could have been: imagine if Reform UK had polled an extra 118 votes in Blackpool South, and snatched second place. Oh, the meltdown there might have been.
But whilst it would have been a field day for the press, the difference between second and third place (especially when the winner took 59 per cent of the vote) is immaterial.
Much more concerning, from CCHQ’s perspective, is the simple fact of the Reform performance. Before the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections, it had never posted a double-digit vote share. Blackpool South was the third. A few months ago, it wasn’t at all obvious that the party’s sometimes-impressive position in national opinion polls could actually translate into votes. There can be less doubt now.
By-elections are special circumstances, of course, especially when it comes to the performance of smaller parties. It’s one thing to pull 17 per cent of the vote in a low-turnout contest that isn’t going to decide the colour of the government; quite another to do the same thing at a general election. Right?
Perhaps. But Reform UK is not a normal minor party.
By-elections have historically favoured parties like the Liberal Democrats because they level the playing field, allowing them to concentrate all their limited resources, human and financial, into one contest. They also reward parties able to run on ultra-focused local messaging, unencumbered by the prospect of actually forming a government.
Does either of those things apply to Reform? Perhaps the first, a little. But compared to the Lib Democrats or the Greens, its activist infrastructure is vestigial. It isn’t even a membership organisation. As to the second, carefully focused-grouped local messaging informed by rich canvassing data is definitely not their style: broad foghorn blasts from Richard Tice about immigration and the evils of “socialism” are the order of the day.
Some factors definitely still play to their advantage regardless: lower turnout, most obviously, and the perceived opportunity to take a safe kick at the Government.
Nonetheless, at least compared to what we normally expect from smaller parties, Reform UK doesn’t seem particularly likely to thrive in by-elections. In fact, to some extent it could even work against them. For in a by-election, the other parties also get to concentrate their troops and financial firepower.
For a party largely dependent on its brand and loud national messaging, with relatively little to leverage by way of activists or money, a by-election suddenly looks a bit like attacking the enemy at a strong point. For might not that same input go further when Labour and the Conservatives are both dividing their attention across dozens of battlegrounds, rather than focusing on a single seat?
This wouldn’t be enough to start actually delivering Reform MPs, of course. That, or even retaining Lee Anderson’s seat in Ashfield, will require the sort of hard, pavement politics the party has not as yet shown that it can do. But as we saw at the weekend (where it picked up just two councillors), Reform doesn’t need to actually win to make life miserable for the Tories.
The question is how big is that latent threat: absent a compelling local candidate or ground machine, with only brand recognition and a noisy national campaign to draw on, how much damage can they do?
Perhaps these by-elections will prove, as they have historically for minor parties, high water marks; at 17 per cent, they are high enough. But maybe not.
The post Smaller parties normally perform better in by-elections, but Reform UK might be different appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Henry Hill
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