Coventry North West

[swanarcadian]

Coventry North West

[Yaffles]

I gather that the choice of Labour candidate here was a bit a two fingered salute to the NEC after an attempted parachute. - All good fun and games.

Whilst on the face of it the numbers here are similar to Coventry South I suspect the Labour vote will be more robust here and therefore I would expect a narrow Labour hold.

[greenchristian]

Nov 11, 2019 13:33:37 GMT Yaffles said:

I gather that the choice of Labour candidate here was a bit a two fingered salute to the NEC after an attempted parachute. - All good fun and games.

Whilst on the face of it the numbers here are similar to Coventry South I suspect the Labour vote will be more robust here and therefore I would expect a narrow Labour hold.

The seat does have rather more of the tribal Labour vote than Coventry South. It's difficult to gauge the impact of the new candidate. Geoffrey Robinson was loved by quite a lot of the local population, and despised by others (some people perceived him as a crook, and others are rather annoyed at his absence from Coventry in recent years), so the new candidate could be good for them or bad for them.

[Pete Whitehead]

My impression (which may be wrong) is that this seat contains a (potentially) much more elastic electorate than South. Whereas South includes both some very wealthy and middle class areas and some utter shite-holes (eg Hillfields), NW has many more of the type of middle income, skilled WC, lower middle class type voters who can swing in large numbers. I'm not sure how much the fact that they actually haven't swung much in parliamentary elections (see eg 1983, the 1976 by-election) is down to Robinson. Local election results suggest that outside of Radford and Holbrook at least there is a tendency to large scale shifts and that the Tories should have the potential to be competitive in a very good year

[Yaffles]

Nov 11, 2019 14:11:13 GMT Pete Whitehead said:

My impression (which may be wrong) is that this seat contains a (potentially) much more elastic electorate than South. Whereas South includes both some very wealthy and middle class areas and some utter shite-holes (eg Hillfields), NW has many more of the type of middle income, skilled WC, lower middle class type voters who can swing in large numbers. I'm not sure how much the fact that they actually haven't swung much in parliamentary elections (see eg 1983, the 1976 by-election) is down to Robinson. Local election results suggest that outside of Radford and Holbrook at least there is a tendency to large scale shifts and that the Tories should have the potential to be competitive in a very good year

You may well be right - as I said my knowledge of Coventry is limited. It will be interesting to see which of these two ends up closer to a Tory win. 

[heslingtonian]

North West is also considerably more Brexity than Coventry South which has some very strong Remain enclaves, Earlsdon in particular which has strongly moved in Labour’s direction lately. If Boris seals the deal with the working class Leave voters, I’d expect Coventry North West to be more winnable but both could turn blue.

[Pete Whitehead]

Nov 11, 2019 18:44:20 GMT heslingtonian said:

North West is also considerably more Brexity than Coventry South which has some very strong Remain enclaves, Earlsdon in particular which has strongly moved in Labour’s direction lately. If Boris seals the deal with the working class Leave voters, I’d expect Coventry North West to be more winnable but both could turn blue.

There is a whole raft of seats in the West Midlands conurbation which could turn blue on a very good night (aided in some cases by poor selection choices by Labour) but where in each case I'd still make Labour favourites - these Coventry seats, the West Bromwich seats, Wolverhamton NE and Birmingham Northfield. Perhaps the last named is not too ambitious, but actually Dudley North is the only 2017 Labour seat in the West Midlands 'county' that you'd have to make the Conservatives favourites (and even there it may not be entirely plain sailing with a strong Brexit party vote and a more sensible looking Labour selection)

[greenchristian]

A poll for my constituency without a "Green gain" option? I feel somewhat insulted.

[swanarcadian]

↑ Who's going to tell him?

[John Chanin]

Only slightly safer than South, which is considered to be the marginal in the city. 

Party	2010	2015	2017
Labour	42.8%	41.0%	54.0%
Conservative	29.3%	31.0%	36.7%
Liberal	17.9%	4.0%	2.6%
UKIP	2.8%	15.7%	3.1%
Green	1.1%	4.3%	1.3%
Other	6.1%	3.9%	2.3%
Majority	13.5%	10.0%	17.2%

[greenchristian]

SOPN

Clare Golby (Conservative)

Stephen Gray (Green)

Greg Judge (Lib Dem)

Taiwo Owatemi (Labour)

Joshua Richardson (Brexit)

The Labour candidate has "address in Coventry North East", despite having lived in London until a couple of weeks ago.

[greenchristian]

First hustings was tonight, with a focus on the environment, greenbelt, and housing. Green, Lib Dem, and Brexit candidates all performed well. Conservative substitute (one of the local councillors) was OK. Labour couldn't be bothered to turn up, so that's about a hundred voters (with almost no party activists) who have a much worse impression of the new candidate. Many of the audience were angry at Geoffrey Robinson's absence from the constituency in recent years, and for the new parachute to not even turn up means I seriously doubt any of the attendees will vote Labour.

Edit: The organisers told me Labour had been invited the day they announced the new candidate, by pretty much every method of trying to contact them.

[AJS]

YouGov MRP:

Lab 42%
Con 40%
LD 8%
BRX 7%
Grn 3%

[greenchristian]

Second hustings was packed with Labour supporters. Labour and Tory candidates didn't perform particularly well (they spent a lot of their time attacking each other, with Tory Clare Golby getting into several spats with the audience), and Greg, the Lib Dem, didn't perform as well as last time. I got very positive feedback, though some of it was with apologies for voting Labour to keep the Tories out.

[mfw]

Well done there.