REFORM’S core strategy: small boats and immigration. Despite being outside Senedd competence, they knew it would resonate.

They’d spent the summer manipulating the British media, stoking tensions over refugee arrivals and blurring the lines between immigration terms. To adapt it for Caerffili, they seized on Wales’s “Nation of Sanctuary” (NoS) policy.

NoS became Reform’s perfect target, neatly framing their “illegal immigrants” narrative. At his campaign launch, candidate Llyr Powell explicitly declared scrapping NoS his signature policy. It backfired.

Online, NoS was a raging fire; on the doorstep, it barely flickered. Yet, the online campaign was brutal. As the campaign progressed, research exposed that 85 per cent of the £55 million NoS budget went to rehouse Ukrainian refugees. This public knowledge armed the opposition to dismantle Reform’s xenophobic arguments. The Ukrainian community, spearheaded by the articulate Yuliia Bond, powerfully exposed how Reform’s campaign demonised their people.

Then came the debate’s defining moment: Cole Vyas, a young man of mixed heritage, and his mother, publicly confronted Llyr Powell.

They exposed how Reform’s rhetoric had fuelled intolerable racism and xenophobia in their community. The full debate barely registered, but that clip went viral, galvanising a widespread backlash against Reform’s NoS campaign, despite some initial support.

Further damaging Reform, former Welsh leader Nathan Gill admitted taking Russian bribes. Powell, his former staffer, claimed ignorance — though Gill himself was the Brexit Party’s 2019 Caerphilly candidate.

The online campaign was a brutal cesspool: vitriolic, abusive, petty and baseless. Sock-puppet accounts swarmed any Caerffili-related posts, creating an echo chamber of manufactured outrage against NoS and absurd claims about Plaid Cymru. Challengers faced barrages of abuse. Yet, this digital toxicity rarely mirrored doorstep conversations until the campaign’s final days.

On the doorstep, “illegal immigrants” and concerns over migrants accessing services or housing before locals did surface. However, these conversations were generally concerned, respectful, friendly, and informed. My primary discussions, overwhelmingly, revolved around local issues: health, the economy, and housing. Only in the final 10 days did a shift occur, with occasional abusive remarks or dismissive shouts from behind the door.

Despite the online noise, three undeniable truths emerged from the outset:

Labour’s vote had collapsed. Door after door, lifelong Labour voters declared they’d never vote Labour again.

Reform was widely despised. A palpable fear among many drove a fierce determination to stop them, no matter what.

Lindsay Whittle was universally known and liked.

The remaining candidates, while no doubt well-meaning and sincere, were effectively irrelevant in this contest. The political context — and the strength of the main campaigns — left them little room to make an impact. I have huge respect for anyone willing to put themselves forward for public scrutiny, but the reality is that this was a two-horse race from the start.

Plaid Cymru managed to pull off one of the most organised and disciplined election campaigns that I have witnessed. The campaign organisers rallied dozens of activists every day who knocked on thousands of doors and had genuine, meaningful conversations with a great many people. Best of all, the data was robust. It meant that by the time the ballot stations closed, the campaign team already had a fair idea of how things would go.

The accepted orthodoxy was that a higher turnout would benefit Reform, which would target “low-propensity voters” (people who don’t normally vote). Plaid Cymru, on the other hand, had to inspire younger voters (polling evidence shows that younger voters in Wales are far more likely to vote for Plaid Cymru).

Since the result was announced, many have said that Plaid Cymru only managed to secure the victory because of tactical voting.

There is certainly a truth to that. The Labour, Lib Dem, and Green votes were all squeezed, and I met a few centrist Tories that voted for Whittle too.

But two points the reader must be aware of: in a first-past-the-post election, every victory is the result of tactical voting. Most votes are wasted, and the elector is wise enough to understand this. Plaid Cymru supporters across Wales have lent their votes to other parties for generations because the alternative was so frightening to them. This is not a new phenomenon.

Fear alone is not enough. The voter must also have confidence in the person or the party that they are willing to lend their vote to. The voters of Caerffili could just as easily have voted for Labour to keep Reform out. But Labour have lost their trust.

Plaid Cymru has slowly released a series of positive, detailed policy pledges over the last year. Electors may not remember the details, but the vibe — and it’s all about the vibes nowadays — the perception in people’s minds is that the party is trustworthy, serious, competent, and on their side. Plaid Cymru also earned their trust, and their vote.

Labour is swiftly becoming irrelevant to Welsh voters. A party trapped in a bygone era, forever reminiscing about “the good old times” with no grasp of the present. They’ve alienated not only their core base but also the crucial floating voters who once lent them support out of fear of the alternatives. UK Labour’s fatal error was adopting the rhetoric of “the others” — a foolish, futile attempt to court ephemeral online voices.

Across Wales, Scotland and England, Labour’s obsession with Reform has been its undoing. Misreading the data, it wrongly feared a mass defection to the populist right. In doing so, it inadvertently legitimised far-right rhetoric, failed to challenge it, and ceded critical political ground where most people actually stand. Frankly, I’ve rarely witnessed such a catastrophic display of political ineptitude.