Clacton Odds: Farage odds-on to win Essex seat in General Election

So the rumours were on the money and Nigel Farage has thrown his hat into the ring as he looks to finally win a seat in the House of Commons, with Clacton in Essex being his target.

Let’s review the initial betting market and the Clacton Odds for the 2024 General Election…

Just when you thought this General Election was going to be about just how much of a pummelling the Tories were going to get at the ballot box, now more column inches will be spent about whether the media’s favourite politician will finally crack that code and win a seat for his latest venture.

UKIP have come and gone, the Brexit Party are no more but Reform UK are sitting in exactly the same space ideologically-speaking and have been polling in third-place pretty consistently for months now. The problem they have is that support is spread over the whole country and with our FPTP electoral system, their chances of winning a seat seemed like an odds-against play, certainly without their best-known advocate standing.

Now though, everything has changed and Nigel Farage has done an about-turn and decided that he really wants to stick it to the Tories. Most observers will note that the vast majority of votes that this party pick up are either from disenfranchised Tory voters or from those who previously didn’t vote. This means that the better Reform UK do, the more the Conservative Party will struggle, not only in Clacton but all around the country.

Clacton of course is the one seat that UKIP won in the 2015 General Election, as former Tory Douglas Carswell held on to the seat. By 2017 however, it swung massively away from that party as UKIP only amassed 3,357 votes with both the Tories (27,031) and Labour (11,203) absolutely trouncing them.

Seven years though is a long time and back then, UKIP were dying but Reform UK are certainly in a better place polling-wise. The anger and undercurrent regarding the Brexit deal and migration is fuelling support, particularly among the older generation and that means that Nigel Farage has arguably his best chance ever of winning a seat. Had he not bottled the Eastleigh by-election in 2013, he likely wins there but now he’s back at the helm of a party whose whole mantra is about ‘common sense’ and attacking the ‘woke culture’ that many a person has a dislike for.

This is why Betfred make Nigel Farage the 4/7 favourite (64% chance) to win the seat. His decision to return to the campaign trail and doing so as a leader of a major political party will ensure that he gets plenty of air time to get his views across. We all know that the more exposure a candidate like Nigel Farage has to the public, the stronger their support gets (see Trump, Donald).

The Tories are available to back at 11/8 (42% chance) with the other three parties out of the running.

*You can always get the latest and live Clacton Odds over on betfred.com

This announcement is a game-changer for the election, as it pretty much puts to bed any sort of political pact between the Tories and Reform UK. They are in for the long-haul (unlike in 2019, when Farage bottled it and stood down all his candidates in Tory-facing seats) and if he sticks to his word and their candidates remain on the ballot across the country, a bad night for Rishi Sunak could be getting an awful lot worse.

As for whether he can actually garner enough support to win Clacton, I think it is a genuine 50:50 toss-up. Unless the Prime Minister has a strong campaign, there is every chance Farage will take his seat on the green benches early next month.

We’ll cover this ongoing story from now through to General Election day itself from our team here at Betfred Insights. Keep checking out our coverage from the Next Prime Minister markets through to key individual constituencies over the coming weeks as we follow the twists and turns from a betting perspective for the 2024 General Election in our Politics Betting Tips section.