Newark by-election
Yesterday was the Newark by-election,
a relatively comfortable hold for the Conservatives over UKIP in second place. When the by-election was first announced there was an obvious risk for the Tories - it was taking place at a time when UKIP would be basking in the glory of a successful European election, there was always that chance that they could have pulled off a surprise victory. In the event it never happened.
I expect to see lots of comment today about what Newark tells us about the state of public opinion. I'll make my usual post by-election comment that it doesn't tell us much at all. By-elections are extremely strange beasts that bear very little resemblence to politics as usual. They take place in but one constituency (which may be extremely unrepresentative of the country as a whole), they have no direct bearing upon who runs the country, only on who the local MP is (voters in Newark knew that whoever won, the next morning there would still be a coalition government under David Cameron) and they experience an intensity of campaigning unlike any other contest. Essentally, if voters at a by-election perform pretty much in line with the national polls it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, if they behave in a different way then it's likely because of the extremely unusual nature of by-election contests.
It doesn't mean that by-elections don't have an important effect on politics - they do. If UKIP had won or been a closer second it would have continued the "UKIP earthquake" narrative. As it is I think it might start playing into a "UKIP faltering" sort of narrative. That wouldn't really be fair - it was, after all, a pretty safe Conservative seat and UKIP increased their vote by 22% - but politics is not always fair.
I've also seem some comment along the lines of why Labour weren't in contention, and whether it was a bad night for them. Realistically by-elections do tend to end up becoming a two-horse race - people rapidly identify who the challenger party is and it normally becomes a fight between them and the incumbent; Labour were just a victim of that. Of course, in a different situation Labour could have been the challenger party - Labour would have needed a swing of 16% or so to win Newark, the sort of swing that the Conservatives got in Norwich North and Crewe & Nantwich. The fact is though that we knew anyway that Labour weren't in that sort of position - they aren't an opposition that's tearing away into the sunset, they are an opposition holding onto a relatively modest poll lead. In the present political context, we shouldn't expect them to be competitive in a seat like Newark.
Finally a brief word about the polling. Survation released a second by-election poll yesterday evening (conducted before the by-election, but released after polls closed), which was almost identical to Lord Ashcoft's a few days earlier. Both polls had the Conservatives on 42%, both had UKIP on 27% and both were relatively close to the actual result of CON 45%, UKIP 26%. Worth noting in particular is that both polls got UKIP right this time, when previous by-election polling has tended to underestimate their support.
