Iain Martin writes about the Crewe and Nantwich by-election that the Tories just won in a landslide (the first by-election they have won against Labour since 1978), and notes something that points to why the victory has broader significance:
A detailed study of the result, according to a Tory campaign source, will “scare the hell out of them”: working class voters in their thirties voted Tory. These are people who previously either did not vote or voted Labour.
Most striking to me was the idea that people in their thirties voted Tory, since these are people who grew up with memories of Major’s failures and have mostly known Labour as the party of government. For a long time, as I had understood it, younger voters were trending heavily away from the Conservative Party, much as they are moving away from the GOP here, and now this may be changing. I don’t know that this can entirely be credited to Cameron, but he seems to be exploiting the slow-motion collapse of Brown’s government better than anyone expected.
