Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
UK Local Elections 2026
23AUG

Clacton's non-Farage vote fell by 11,861

3 min read
19:09UTC

The vote for everyone other than Farage fell from 24,733 to 12,872 in two years, while his own rose by 1,014.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins ClactonJump to analysis ↓
PoliticsDeveloping
Key takeaway

Missing opposition voters, not switchers, produced Farage's seventeen-point rise in vote share at Clacton.

Tendring District Council published a total for each of the 34 Clacton candidates and no total valid vote 1. Summing the 34 published figures gives 35,111, and that reproduced number is the denominator behind every percentage quoted for the result. On it, Nigel Farage took 63.34% and Count Binface 26.93%. Anyone citing 63.34% is citing arithmetic performed on the declaration rather than a share the council itself certified.

In July 2024 Farage won the same seat with 21,225 of 45,958 valid votes on a turnout of 58.7% 2. Turnout this time was 14.3 points lower. His own vote rose by 1,014 between the two contests, while the vote for every other candidate fell from 24,733 to 12,872, a drop of 48% 3.

The seventeen-point jump in his share therefore rests on 11,861 missing opposition votes rather than on the 1,014 he added. Five parties declined to put a candidate on the paper , and the voters who did not turn out in August were overwhelmingly theirs. The August figure records which Reform UK supporters could be got to a polling station in the holidays, and says nothing about how many people in Clacton prefer Reform to the alternatives.

That distinction will not survive the number's next outing. A reproduced 63.34% is already the kind of benchmark that gets quoted in the reorganisation arguments and in the run-up to the 2027 unitary elections, and it travels without its denominator or its boycott attached. Whatever the next Clacton contest produces will be measured against a share no opponent ever tested.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Think of Clacton's 2024 result as one group of voters and the 2026 by-election as a different, much smaller group, even though it is technically the same seat. When 58.7% of people vote and then only 44.37% do, comparing the two results directly can be misleading, because the people who stayed home the second time were not evenly spread across every party's supporters. In this case, the voters who disappeared were mostly the ones who had backed someone other than Farage in 2024. His own vote barely grew, but because so many of his opponents' voters did not bother turning out, his share of the much smaller vote looks far larger than his actual support.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

A single-candidate-field by-election gives opposition-minded voters nothing to vote for. With Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all absent, voters who wanted to register dissent had no comparably resourced option, and many simply did not travel to the polling station.

Turnout collapse in this kind of contest is compounded by the absence of the canvassing and get-out-the-vote operations that major parties normally run. Without a ground campaign urging opposition voters out, a portion of the electorate that would vote in a general election does not vote at all.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    National reporting of the 63% Reform share will overstate the swing unless it also reports the turnout collapse behind it.

Sources:Tendring District Council·UK Parliament·ITV News Anglia
Mentions:Tendring District Council →Nigel Farage →Count Binface →Clacton →Parliament →Reform UK →John Curtice →Liberal Democrats →
First Reported In

Update #16 · Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton

Tendring District Council· 23 Aug 2026
Read original →
Different Perspectives
Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton
Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton
Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.
Scottish Labour members
Scottish Labour members
Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.
Labour Party
Labour Party
Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.
Liberal Democrats
Liberal Democrats
The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.
Reform UK
Reform UK
Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.