UK local by-elections, 2023

[EastAnglianLefty]

It should also be remembered that Golders Green is anyway likely to be somewhere where the Tory vote is particularly robust.

[EastAnglianLefty]

- The Labour lead is partially inflated by 2019 Tory voters answering "don't know" in polls but will come back to the Tories in a vote. Personally I think in an general election Labour tomorrow would probably win by 13-16.

But you wouldn’t expect such people to vote in local elections, especially by-elections. If you’re unhappy with your party enough to say you wouldn’t currently vote for them, you’re probably not part of the small minority of people still voting for them at every opportunity The issue is that Labour rarely get the sort of swing to them the national polls imply, while the Tories tend to do poorly (but not as poorly as the polls imply). As I said, some of this will be down to by-elections factors that won’t be replicated in the local elections of a general election, but even then I’m not sure current voting intention is quite as dire for the Conservatives as polling suggests.

It's worth pointing out that turnout in a lot of contests has been dire even by the standards of local by-elections - sub-20% in a lot of cases. Under those circumstances, most of the electorate are the people who always vote, a lot of them are strong partisans and there's a higher likelihood that they're not representative of broader bulk of the electorate who will definitely vote in the general election.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that the results are irrelevant, but I'd rely on them even less than I would have with local by-elections in previous years.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Except that it isn't actually a universal rule - Oxford is bringing in similar driving measures, and there hasn't yet been a Tory return from the dead there electorally.

The Oxford scheme is different, isn’t it?  Not actually a congestion charge, but restrictions on using certain roads, and they only apply to city residents if they want to use them a lot.

It's not entirely clear what the Cambridge scheme is - it's currently out for consultation. The usual pattern is that things are incredibly unpopular in the abstract but somewhere between slightly unpopular and irrelevant in practice.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'd also note that whilst Kings Hedges itself is a deprived area, it's also a very low-turnout area and there are other bits of the ward. Specifically, there is Milton Road, which is full of very large houses with multiple cars on the driveway and which is capable of contributing many more votes than its proportion of the ward would suggest. It's also one of the areas most affected by efforts to reshape Cambridge's traffic to promote public transport ridership, because it's the major corridor linking the north of the city to the A14.

It's not enough to make the difference on its own, but it certainly reduces the level of backlash needed in the rest of the ward to make a difference at the ballot box.

[EastAnglianLefty]

According to figures from the last census, the population is only about 10% students (and hence the electorate will be substantially less again.) By Bristol standards that's not that studenty and I don't think that will have had a big impact on the result.

[EastAnglianLefty]

One would presume either the prior candidate no longer had support from community leaders, or the Tories decided that they didn't want to have to deal with them in the group.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Certainly in the locals this year, Labour did much better in straight fights with the Tories than in ones with (largely ex-Tory) independents standing as well. That would be consistent with an electorate wanting to hurt the Tories but not being certain which party was best placed to do that.