Number crunching: Was there a “Coleman effect” in Barnet and Camden?

In Barnet and Camden local traders, campaigners and bloggers came together with a campaign to sack their Conservative Assembly Member Brian Coleman. The reasons for this are long and arduous but are essentially a combination of a reaction to Coleman’s generally boorish and offensive manner to his constituents, with a backlash against the Conservative council in Barnet of which Coleman is a councillor.

The ad hoc campaigners believe, with much justification, that Barnet council is more than simply a typical Conservative council, but is one that does not listen, even to its friends, and has sought to go into a privatisation over-drive. Many traditional Conservative voters vocally expressed their dissatisfaction with the administration and Mr Coleman believing he should be unseated.

We know know that he lost the seat to Labour’s Andrew Dismore, but is there any evidence that this was anything except the effect of Labour’s surge on the Assembly?

Yes, it seems there’s is. Let’s look at the numbers;

Constituency results in Barnet and Camden:

Ouch. Losing 1/4 of your vote from last time (2008) is bad, but we need to compare this vote with the other papers to know whether there is a “Coleman effect”.

List vote in Barnet and Camden (only five parties contesting constituency shown):

Here the final column represents the difference between list and constituency votes.

One in ten people who voted Conservative on the list chose to vote for someone other than Brian Coleman on the other paper.

6% of voters chose a party other than Labour on the list and plumped for Andrew Dismore in the Constituency, as the person best placed to unseat Coleman. Something like one in ten voters in the Constituency of Barnet and Camden voted tactically against Brian Coleman either by choosing Dismore despite not being natural Labour supporters, or not voting Coleman despite hoping to elect more Conservative Assembly Members.

That’s approximately 17,000 people in the constituency.

Just for fun, let’s also look at the first preference votes for Mayor while we’re here;

The fourth column represents the difference between Mayoral first preference and votes on the Constituency paper. Again only candidates on the Constituency paper are included for the purposes of this exercise. The turnout on the three papers, while not identical, was not significantly different.

Of those who voted for Boris Johnson (first preference) around 40% of them did not vote for Brian Coleman. Almost 10% of the electorate as a whole voted Andrew Dismore but did not vote Ken Livingstone first preference. That’s around a quarter of Dismore’s voters did not first preference Labour’s Mayoral candidate. This demonstrates an incredible willingness to shift voting behaviour based on the constituency AM, particularly when you consider that in most constituencies voters couldn’t even name their Assembly Member.

In an area where the Conservative Mayoral candidate out polled the Labour candidate by a massive 15% the constituency seat itself fell to Labour by one and a half percent. Incredible.

Bearing in mind that some voters will have been so put off by Brian Coleman that they didn’t vote for the Conservatives at all these differences indicate only those who are already in the Conservative orbit but were keen to make a statement against Brian Coleman and Barnet council or were supporters of non-Labour candidates who were willing to boost Dismore in order to unseat Coleman.

One last caveat to all of this.

Actually most voters in Camden have no idea who Brian Coleman is.

As yet we don’t have the breakdowns on a ward by ward basis so we can’t see how heavy the effect was in Barnet itself, although reports from the count were that Coleman’s council ward voted heavily against the man, which does not bode well for his prospects at  the council elections in two years time, should the Conservative Party be silly enough to re-select him.