What happens when Reform launch a full scale local by-election campaign in one of our held wards?
A by-election was called in mid July following the death of one of our long standing councillors in Swale. The Reform Party made it very quickly clear that they were keen to give us a run for our money having done well in the General Election in Faversham and Mid Kent. They selected quickly, the former vice chair of the local Conservative Party, and got straight out on the doorsteps. It became obvious that they were going to work really hard and had a young and enthusiastic team.
We had an few advantages over Reform. We had a candidate that had already been working in the ward as a town councillor, we had a small but established delivery network, a team of other local councillors and we had data. We got our campaign plan in place before the election was called and used the last few couple of weeks the General Election to focus on the ward and raise money.
What we didn’t know was what kind of a campaign Reform were going to fight or what the other parties were going to do. The Green Party didn’t manage to find a candidate, the Labour Party started running a small campaign with some door knocking and the Conservatives were entirely absent.
The Reform party did no ward wide delivery. What they did do is knock on thousands of doors. I would be surprised if they had not knocked the entire ward 4 or 5 times by polling day. They motivated people who have not voted before and those that were formally supporters or all other parties to come and join them door knocking and drafted in Reform members from all over Kent to help. Most week days they had 2-3 people knocking and on the weekends this went up to between 10-20.
Reform clearly found their supporters or people that were undecided and spoke to them many times. They also had two large rallies with guest speakers and photo opportunities organised by their former parliamentary candidate , Maxwell Harrison who is clearly an up and coming star of the Reform party. Their messaging was a mix of surface level aspiration , “we will make history”, “Something is happening out there”, “things are changing” and selling the local credentials of the candidate “born and bred”. They did not focus on many local issues apart from making the speed limit on local roads faster and reducing council tax.
We had to work hard, we had delivered 3 ward wide leaflets, three sets of street letters and blue letters to the postal voters followed by two more ward wide leaflets, a targeted squeeze leaflet, blue letters to our supporters and Green voters and knocked thousands of residents. On polling day, we became aware that some of our previous voters were voting for Reform, they were a visible, organised and hard working presence throughout the election. Despite not sharing values, people appreciated that and many saw them as a “change” from the status quo. There were times where things looked incredibly close.
Luckily the brilliant Alex Eyre beat them by 116 votes. It won’t be the last we hear from them and we are ready for whatever they do next.
The key take aways from this election for me were:
- Despite being on polar opposites of the political spectrum and finding a lot of their views abhorrent, we can, and do lose support to Reform for a variety of reasons and just because we as activists would not dream of supporting them, does not mean that our previous supporters won’t.
- If we had not had the data that we had and not been as organised as we were in our campaign approach, there would have been a real risk of us losing to them. They are not always going to just be a name of a ballot they are sometimes going to work really hard and we will need to do the same.
- YOU CAN NEVER DO ENOUGH DOOR KNOCKING.
We prevented Nigel Farage or Richard Tice coming to our town for some jubilant victory nonsense, held the ward of a much loved and missed colleague and added the brilliant Alex to our team at the Borough Council.