Dave Holland, the Reform UK candidate for the possible Mid Bedfordshire by-election, has said his team is “working hard” in his campaign to replace Nadine Dorries.
“But it’s very difficult without an end date, but we are all in the same boat,” he said.
“So far we’ve knocked a fraction under 10,000 doors which isn’t enough, because I want to knock 53,000 doors by the time of the election.
“On a bad day, I’m getting around 10 per cent of people saying that they’ll vote for me.
“And a lot of undecided, but on a good day, I’m getting 25 or 30 per cent.
“I understand that some people may think they’re saying ‘I’ll vote for you’ to be left alone to watch the football or whatever,” he admitted.
“But it’s not like that, they’re saying ‘I’m voting for you because of what you put on your leaflet, or posted on social media’.
“So there seems to be some passion and understanding behind what we’re trying to do, so it seems real.
“But this is my first election campaign, so I’ve got nothing to base it on apart from other people’s perception of an area.
“It’s not easy to win from where we are, a party that’s less than two years old,” he said.
“It would be inconceivable, on the one hand, to think that we’re going to storm to victory in this by-election.
“On the other hand, some days it seems inconceivable that we’re not going to.
“But, I’m not deluding myself, it’s just if you ask people how they’re going to vote and they say ‘you’ and they tell you why, then [that’s positive],” he said.
He added that he is also getting quite a lot of traction with social media.
“The amount of people I see when I’ve been out who say ‘I watched one of your videos, it’s very good’, and people saying ‘please keep saying what you’re saying’.
“I think people vote for personalities and [social media] seems to be working for me. But whether it will work enough, who knows, but that’s my strategy at the minute. It’s just to keep hitting it as hard as I can, it’s not over until it’s over,” he said.
Dave Holland can be found on Twitter and TikTok.
by John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
