July 20 looks like a bad day to be Rishi Sunak

Ell Folan is the founder of Stats for Lefties

On 20 July, the Conservatives will find themselves fighting to survive in three by-election contests. Prompted by the resignations of Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip), Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) and David Warburton (Somerton and Frome), this bumper set of by-elections is the most held on a single day since June 1994. More notably, though, it is the most Tory defences on a single day since November 1962 – and all three look set to flip to the opposition.

The by-elections could not have come at a worse time for Rishi Sunak. The embattled Prime Minister has seen his popularity erode, with his personal net approval with YouGov dropping from +1 in October to -19 last month. In a broader sense, his party has also slid backwards, with Labour’s average poll lead rising from 15pts in May to 18pts in June.

One major contributor to the PM’s troubles is the state of the economy. Inflation stands at 8.7%, putting pressure on voters’ incomes – worse still, food inflation stands at 18.4%. In response, the Bank of England has raised interest rates to 5%, further squeezing the funds of mortgage-holders who have traditionally backed the Conservatives but are now breaking for Labour.

Partially because of these economic difficulties, voters now trust Labour on the economy, a significant metric considering the Tories consistently led on the economy from 2008 up until 2022. On top of that, the drama surrounding Boris Johnson’s suspension from the House of Commons has damaged the Tory brand further – 73% of voters now view the Tories as divided, compared to 32% who say the same of Labour.

All of these factors – plus general exhaustion at 13 years of Tory governance – have combined to produce a scenario where three Conservative seats (two of them historically rock solid) are likely to flip to the opposition. Each seat is slightly different, but they are united by the fact that all three gave the Conservatives an absolute majority of the popular vote in 2019, and yet are all now slipping out of the party’s grasp. The opposition is not simply competitive because of tactical voting; the Conservatives’ popular support has quite simply collapsed.

Uxbridge and South Ruislip is the most vulnerable Tory seat, and perhaps the easiest to predict. In 2019, Boris Johnson prevailed by a margin of 15pts, meaning Labour needs a net swing of 7.5pts to gain the seat. My seat projection methodology (based on Martin Baxter’s “Strong Transition Model”) indicates that the party would easily achieve this, gaining the seat with a 17% swing, and winning an absolute majority of the vote (50.4%).

Selby and Ainsty is a much safer Conservative seat, with Nigel Adams defeating Labour by 20,000 votes (35.7pts) in December 2019. Yet because the Tories’ popularity has collapsed so much, they are still at risk of losing. My seat projection method points to a narrow defeat for the Conservatives in the North Yorkshire seat, with Labour achieving a 20% swing in its favour and gaining the seat for the first time since 2005.

Selby and Ainsty is the least vulnerable of the three seats, and still has a chance of staying Tory if the party recovers slightly in the polls before the end of July, but the fact this rock-solid safe seat is even slightly competitive is awful news for Rishi Sunak.

Somerton and Frome, the final seat up for election, is the hardest to project. On paper, my seat model (based on national polling) would point to a three-way race; however, this is not at all a realistic reflection of how this campaign will unfold. This is definitively a Conservative/Lib Dem contest (Ed Davey’s party finished second in 2019), and the Liberal Democrats have demonstrated their renewed capacity to gain rural Conservative seats three times since 2019. They are campaigning hard in this seat, and Labour is not a serious contender.

Given all of this, my projection for this seat disregards national trends and instead looks at tactical voting and how the Lib Dems have performed in by-elections since 2019. In these contests, Labour has seen the vast majority of its voters (75% on average) switch to the Lib Dems to defeat the Tories. Additionally, it is the Lib Dems who have benefitted from the Conservative collapse in these sorts of Tory/Lib Dem by-election contests, as opposed to Labour who are benefitting nationally. Finally, the Lib Dems held this parliamentary seat from 1997-2015, and won it easily in the 2023 local elections.

Adjusting for all these factors (tactical voting, Lib Dem overperformance in by-elections, and local Lib Dem strength) I project a big win for the Liberal Democrats in Somerton and Frome. My estimate suggests they would win 57% of the vote (+31pts), easily defeating the Tories on 33% (-23pts). This would represent a swing of 27pts, slightly below the average swing to the Lib Dems in the previous three Conservative/Lib Dem contests (30pts). But this is to be expected, because the Lib Dems did far better in Somerton and Frome in 2019 (coming second with 26%).

In short, these three by-elections actually provide us with a perfect sample of seats to assess the Tories’ popularity in different types of seats. Uxbridge and South Ruislip is an outer London Tory/Labour marginal seat that has been trending towards Labour over the past decade; Selby and Ainsty is a Tory rural seat composed of small towns that backed Labour under Tony Blair; and Somerton and Frome is a rural Tory/Lib Dem seat in Southern England. Losing even one of these seats would suggest that the Tories will likely face defeat in 2024. Losing all three would indicate that the party is on course for a historic landslide loss that would put 1997 and 1945 to shame.

At present, polls suggest that this triple defeat is exactly what you should expect to happen – a stunning prospect for a Conservative Party that won a landslide majority less than four years ago.

Image credit: Simon Walker / Number 10 – Creative Commons

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