Farage kept his support in Clacton, but the campaign - self-interested, cynical, sleazy, desperate and ultimately preposterous - hurt his chances across the UK.
Paradoxically, this is actually pretty good evidence of the strategic danger to Reform. It should be impossible to take a local result this strong for Farage and turn it into a demonstration of his weakness, but actually even the Clacton numbers hold worrying signs for his party.
What do we know about Reform, after several byelections? We know that non-Reform voters are highly motivated to vote tactically in order to beat them. In other words, they are not really non-Reform voters, they are anti-Reform voters, who will back almost anyone to stop them.
In Caerphilly in October 2025 tactical voting handed the victory to Plaid. Labour, Green and Lib Dem support collapsed and went to Welsh nationalists. The BBC even reported some Tory voters backing the party. In Gorton and Denton last February it handed the victory to the Greens. Ahead of the vote, 77% Labour voters said they’d vote Green to stop Reform, as did 73% of Lib Dems and 24% of Tories.
We saw a similar pattern towards Labour in Andy Burnham’s Makerfield contest, although it’s obviously complicated by how unusual that byelection was. The ensuing Manchester mayoral byelection last month, on the other hand, provided unusual degrees of clarity. This is because it uses a supplementary system, where voters pick the candidate they most want to win but can express their preferences even if they lose. It allows us to see clearly the kind of thinking which we usually have to interpret from vote share.
Labour’s Bev Craig won 47.1% in the first preference votes against Reform’s 21%. When supplementary voters were distributed, she won 66.3% to Reform’s 33.7%. More in Common polling showed 66% of Green voters backed the Labour candidate as their second choice. They were supported by a sizable minority of Conservative voters.
So that’s the background. Now let’s see what happened in Clacton. This is the most right-wing seat in the country. In 2024 it had the highest combined right vote of any constituency. And that, of course, is why we all expected Farage to win. But even here, in the deepest heartland, there was significant tactical voting. After all, what the hell else is a vote for Count Binface? The normal parties aren’t standing, so he became the default vehicle by which you’d try to stop Reform. This secured him 9,455 votes. For a satirical space alien whose main policy proposal is about the height of a hand dryer in a pub toilet.
Tactical voting is alive and well. This pattern, repeated across the country, is what should trouble Reform. Will it ever stop Farage in Clacton? No. But it’ll ruin him nationally, especially if the Conservative vote holds up.
Farage is caught in a pincer movement. He surely gets the tactical voting problem. He’s not an idiot. But he is now trapped by the X.com eco-system.
Elon Musk has worked diligently to give the ethno-nationalist Rupert Lowe and his Restore party all the momentum, biting Reform’s ankles from even further to the right. Meanwhile, Farage’s own people are degenerating into ever more extreme and angry rhetoric. Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf branded former defence secretary and member of the armed forces Ben Wallace a “traitor” recently, earning only a mild rebuke from his party leader.
I think we can clearly see that X.com, which now has an ethno-nationalist edge, is pushing right-wingers to adopt radical positions which turn the electorate against them.
Farage is therefore in the worst of all worlds. He is seeing concerted tactical voting against his candidates in diverse areas of the UK - from Wales to Manchester to Clacton itself. His best way of defusing those tactical votes is to moderate the rhetoric of his colleagues, to try to upset people a little less and therefore play less of a role in their voting calculations. But he cannot do so, because the remorseless logic of the X radicalisation algorithm pushes his party towards becoming more severe, or else it loses its activist base and its most highly-engaged voters to Restore.
He’s trapped.
