Who stayed at home in Norwich North?

By Rich Green / @ricjgreen

The conclusions drawn by the commentariat from the Norwich North results have gone through several stages of wrongness. First, there was the predictable, OMG landslide coverage. Then, as the wreckage cleared, this gave way to a slightly more reflective analysis of how the Tories managed to get a landslide result without winning over any new voters (and actually losing 2,000 of their own).

This latest position is where I’ve been for the last few days. I, plus a lot of other armchair-analysts, have been working on the supposition that the Labour core vote stayed at home on Thursday, while the Tory vote turned out, because:

a) Tory voters are naturally more tolerant of corruption, and

b) they scented the opportunity to stick it to their political enemies.

However, there is one assumption that does still deserve unpicking: which Labour voters actually stayed at home on Thursday? Was it the core vote? Or was it other groups?

There is a natural assumption amongst Labour organisers that whenever we talk of turnout, we’re talking about core vote turnout. That is, traditional working class areas, who remember just what the Tories are like and would never vote for them in large numbers, but are more than willing to boycott an election all together if they feel Labour is getting to look and sound too much like it’s not looking after their interests any more.

I have no doubt this is part of what was going on in Norwich last week, but without drilling down into the results for each individual polling district, we can’t know for sure. And it’s worth remembering that there are many other ways of segmenting the electorate other than on class and geography. For example the Times reports on how Labour’s big drop in the opinion polls in recent months has largely been fuelled by a shift female voter preferences, whereas male voting patterns have remained largely stable.

Why does this matter? Because part of building the response to the Norwich result depends on knowing exactly which voters we lost there, and why. My instinct is that part of our response has to be about demonstrating to our core vote that they are not, and never have been, taken for granted by this government. But it would probably be a mistake to frame our entire message in terms of addressing core Labour voters, partially because fewer and fewer people identify themselves in those terms any more; and partially because if we want to sound like a party still committed to delivering real change, we have to be seen to be willing to make our case to the whole country, not just one segment of it.

But within that broad framework, there are still lessons to be learned about how different segments of the electorate voted in this by-election, and the best way to analyse this result is by doing a ward & polling district analysis of the Norwich result. So, my question to the interwebs, does anyone have a sampling breakdown of how the different polling districts in Norwich voted yet?

This post was first published at Rich Green’s blog.