‘Reform are going to freshen things up’. Howard looks up from the candy crush-style game he is playing on his mobile. He, despite being a lifelong Tory, will be voting for Nigel Farage’s party today in the Greater Lincolnshire Mayoral election.
We’re visiting areas of the mayoralty with the most Tory and Labour voters, places where people steadfastly voted Conservative while the party was being decimated in other parts of the country last summer. These are the voters that Reform are now focusing on. None of our conversations are pre-arranged, as we want to get as close to people in their natural environments as possible. A team goes door to door in the most Tory streets in Grantham while another interviews people in cafes and pubs across the more Labour leaning Lincoln.
What we found is something that should scare both mainstream parties: a normalisation of the Reform brand. Even amongst those who are not voting for the party, a detoxification is underway – ‘I won’t be voting for them, but they are resonating with people’, explained a lifelong Lib Dem voter, on the doorstep in Grantham. People who ruled out voting for the party as recently as last summer are now open to making the jump.
On a pleasant village green in a middle-class neighbourhood of Lincoln, a father and his middle-aged son, traditional Tory voters, are both voting Reform ‘You’ll also get people like me, who might not necessarily agree with their policies, they will get the protest vote. You don’t have to agree with their policies to vote for them. It was just the anti other two vote. And there’s no other credible opposition,’ the son explains.
Despite sounding like music to the ears of Reform strategists, it also represents a very real problem too. While their success is driven in large part by voters’ dismay at the performance of the Tories and Labour– across the country our research has found the traditional establishment parties are lumped in as ‘all the same’ and ‘just as bad as each other’ – could being destigmatised also mean Reform falls into the “same old” bracket?
We’re already seeing the warning signs. In Lincoln a Reform voter showing her friend round the city is asked what she thinks about Farage. ‘I used to like him, but I think since he’s become an MP and he’s gone through those rather large doors of Westminster, he’s been dumbed down. They have to sign something when they go in. It’s an oath of some sort. They all change the moment they walk through the door.’
Reform are trying to strike a fine balance. Being the fresh party of change, the antithesis of the tired traditional options, but also the respectable choice that aspirational voters can tell their neighbours they are plumping for without risk of social backlash, as they make small talk over the garden fence. In the same way they once would have said Tory or Labour.
How do you square that circle?
Reform’s likely victory here in Greater Lincolnshire, and successes across the country in these local elections suggest their strategy is working – for now. Their brand is palatable to more and more voters and the Tories and Labour remain as electorally appealing as Katy Perry. But with every electoral success brings the unavoidable veneer of establishment, and Reform’s great balancing act becomes even more precarious.
Join us at ‘Coffee House Shots Live: The local elections shake-up’ on Wednesday 7 May, with special guests Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Zia Yusuf. Book your tickets here
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