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Happy by-election results day!

In this week’s newsletter:

• How big of a victory was Clacton for Farage? The two key numbers to look at to measure Reform’s performance (and the two slightly different stories they tell).
  
  
• The view from the focus groups: we’ve been in Clacton in recent weeks talking to voters on the ground. What was driving the vote last week, and what do voters in Clacton feel about Farage?
  
  
• Does extreme weather change climate attitudes? With millions of Britons living in droughts and under hosepipe bans, how are attitudes toward climate action changing?

For this week's episode of our Opinion Brief Podcast, I was delighted to be joined by Josh Glancy, Associate Editor at the Sunday Times, as we discussed what results from Clacton might mean for the Battle for the Right.

You can listen in here:

Clacton: a tale of two numbers

The Clacton By-Election was not an easy one to benchmark; the circumstances were just too weird. With a main party leader running in a race where his main opponent was a comedy candidate, it's not easy to find a historic race to compare Farage’s result to.

But there are two numbers that are most useful: Farage's share of the vote, and the raw number of votes Farage won.

Starting with the latter: one threshold for Farage to beat was 21,000, which is what he won in the 2024 General Election. Beating that number - getting 22,000 people to show up on the hottest day of the year, in a semi-uncontested election - suggests that there has been no diminution of enthusiasm among his supporters, and some new converts. On this metric, Nigel Farage will likely be pleased.

We met some of those enthusiastic supporters in Clacton. In our focus groups, his personal popularity shone through: while there's no doubt that the finance row has taken some of the shine off Farage for many voters, his ardent supporters often agreed with Farage that it was an establishment stitch-up, or at least no worse than what other voters get up to.

A lot of it is jealousy. And why shouldn't that man - if they gave me five million, I’d take it and run (...). And I do not blame him. If he’s using it for his protection, good on him. I’m not a bit jealous of it.

Maureen, retired, Clacton

I don’t give a what’s-it about the five million, because all the other parties have received millions. Sainsbury’s gave 18 million pounds to the Labour Party and the Conservative Party over the years. And because they declared it, nobody bothered to deny it. But there’s millions and millions being shovelled at these politicians, which is obscene.

Angela, retired, Jaywick

I think it’s a great shame that he’s being picked on as such. There’s so many — Prime Ministers, his team, so many in the Labour and the Conservatives who have received enormous amounts of money in the past and not declared them. If you’re going to go for one, they should all be investigated. Let’s have all the cards on the table.

Sylvia, project manager, Clacton

But another number is more of a red flag for Reform - vote share. We expected this to go up, and it did, but at 63 per cent it was toward the lower end of expectations. And Count Binface won 27 per cent, around six times higher than any comedy candidate in a parliamentary election - a reminder that Farage’s opponents are highly motivated to turn out too, whoever the main challenger is.

We heard a range of views about Binface: some grew to like him, many felt he was making a ‘mockery’ of the contest and trivialising Clacton’s vote. And many felt slightly incredulous that they were considering voting for him. The fact that nearly 10,000 people turned up to vote for a man dressed as a bin is certainly a sign that the anti-Reform vote is mobilised and engaged.

It looks like I'm voting for a man that wears a dustbin on his head, because as a woman I've got to vote. Coming from the East End, I was brought up that women acted to earn the right to vote, so I always vote. But being as nobody else is really standing against him, there's no option really.
Nicola, teaching assistant, Clacton

Out of all of them, I like Farage’s views the best. And even now - sorry, guys - I’d probably still vote him back in, only because who the hell is Binface? Seriously, that is just an absolute mickey-take. Imagine him sitting in there. That is a joke. That’s the laughing stock. He’s the only one that’s really trying to rein things in and make it better for working people, to be honest.
Lisa, postal worker, Little Clacton

From what I can tell about Binface, he seems like an okay guy, from the research I’ve done. And I do think there would be some tourism involved, because of the absurdity of having that candidate as the MP for Clacton. It’s so ridiculous — it’s like, well, you know what? Can he do a worse job than anyone else has done? Or can he actually be better? This really outlandish character — can he actually do better than the people in suits and ties actually serving the people?

Callum, online music retailer, Clacton

In this context, the fact that turnout was relatively high for a by-election (usually we see turnout drop by around 25 percentage points in by-elections; in this one, it only dropped by around 15) is both a testament to Reform’s ability to turn out the vote, and a warning sign that anti-reform voters are turning out as well.

That anti-Farage vote isn’t a danger in seats like Clacton. But in swing seats, where the opposition unites and the Tories refuse to be squeezed, it becomes a real problem. We saw progressive tactical voting and turnout play out to block Reform in Makerfield and in Gorton and Denton.

And equally concerning for Reform is the fact that Farage didn’t seem to be able to unite the right in Clacton. By some metrics, it would be fair to call Clacton the most right-leaning constituency in Britain; in 2024, right-wing parties won 74 per cent of the vote between them - higher than any other seat in the country. And not since 2010 has the combined right bloc dropped below 69 per cent - until today.

When we spoke to current and former Conservative voters in Clacton, their apathy was clear to see: many said they would just tick a name at random, play “eeny, meeny, miny, mo” or even sit this election out. Beyond Clacton, Reform will need to unite the bloc and mobilise these right-leaning voters.

I have voted, because I take a postal vote, so I’ve already done it. But I just went eeny, meeny, miny, mo. I’ve picked someone that’s supposed to have a clinic in Colchester, so I thought, that’s pretty near. Some of them, they live in Scotland.
Christine, retired, Frinton

I meet up regularly with mates, and there were about eight of us around the table last week. I said, “Is everybody looking forward to the by-election?” And there wasn’t one person who knew who they would vote for. They knew who they wouldn’t vote for.
Mike, retired, Clacton

Politico's Sam Blewett produced a great long read after attending our Clacton focus groups. You can read about them here:

You can hear about our focus groups in the New Statesman podcast too: 

Do heatwaves change how we feel about climate change?

Around 45 million people are now living in a drought area in England, and 20 million are in areas with a hosepipe ban across the UK. Extreme heat now feels inescapable, and so it’s no surprise that the salience of climate change has risen slightly. But interestingly, it hasn’t risen for everyone, and nor has it yet moved the dial on policies like net zero. Why?

In March, 12 per cent said climate change and the environment was one of the three most important issues facing the country. But now, after a month of extreme heat, that’s risen to 16 per cent, taking climate from tenth to eighth on the national list of top issues. But taking a longer-term view, salience has been in decline for a few years - and even now it remains about half of its 2023 peak in our polling.

And climate concern hasn’t been rising evenly across groups. It’s risen across age groups: every generation is now more likely to see climate as a top issue than they were in March. Climate is now a top-ten issue for every generation. But this increase has been more concentrated among certain voters: among Green Party voters, climate has risen from 36 to 50 per cent, among Liberal Democrats from 16 to 26 per cent, and among Labour voters from 20 to 23 per cent. Conservative voters have not moved at 10 per cent, and Reform UK voters have remained at 4 per cent. Only Green Party and Liberal Democrat voters put climate in their top three.

In other words, the priority gap has widened - left-leaning voters are thinking about climate change more, but right-leaning voters aren’t.

A rise in concern doesn’t translate into support for climate policies. And in fact, climate concern is decoupling from support for Net Zero. Two in three Britons (66 per cent) say they are worried about climate change, a figure that has held stable in recent years and spiked during the heatwave. Over the same period, support for the Net Zero target has moved in the opposite direction, falling from 68 per cent in 2024 to 45 per cent today. That's not mainly because opposition has increased - voters are still twice as likely to say they support than oppose the net zero target - but because ambivalence has risen.

Crucially, we’re not seeing people turn against renewables: Britons still want to see action to tackle climate change. But the Net Zero target has become polarising.

Interestingly, support for Net Zero has only marginally dropped among 2024 Labour voters: it’s clear that action on climate change remains an important glue that holds together Labour’s coalition - and most want to see Burnham take action.

It is among voters on the right that support has dropped the most - including among 2024 Conservative voters. It’s an interesting example of how public attitudes are reflecting a breakdown of consensus at party leadership level: after the Conservative Party’s stance on the Climate Change Act has shifted from Boris Johnson to Kemi Badenoch, so too have the views of Conservative voters.

As well as helping to adapt to extreme weather (three in five want greater action to prepare Britain for heatwaves), Britons also want reassurance that the energy transition will be fair - and that the public’s top issue - the cost of living - is eased by producing more renewable energy.

Thank you for reading!

All the best, 

Luke