The town and its surrounding villages, while containing some affluent pockets, are afflicted overall by high unemployment and poverty rates. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 70% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union. Two years earlier, Reform's predecessor, the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won a parliamentary race for the first time — in Clacton.

In a political pattern that has become familiar in the United States and continental Europe, voters in Clacton, which is home to relatively few migrants, tend to be far more vociferous than the general population in demanding that immigration be cut dramatically.

Farage "has been able to play on people's fears," Wickham-Jones said, "and concerns about identity — a sense that society has been changing rapidly." Other politicians, he said, have struggled to articulate a counternarrative about the social benefits of immigration, or less drastic ways of curtailing it.

The Labor candidate in Clacton is a charismatic 27-year-old named Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who was born in the English town of Nottingham and is of Jamaican and Ghanaian heritage. He is seen as having little chance of overtaking Farage, although some political observers believe his quick-witted, social-media-heavy campaign style marks him as someone who could ascend the national stage at some point.

On a Clacton side street, Pushkar Dhasmala, a 40-year-old immigrant from India, said he supported Owusu-Nepaul but knew that most of his neighbors did not.

"The care sector is dependent on immigrants," said Dhasmala, who works in a privately run assisted-living facility. Farage's opponent, he said, "understands the situation" faced by those newly arrived and trying to make a home in Britain.

Labor's expected dominance in the national parliamentary vote bucks a recent trend of nationalist-populist success elsewhere in Europe. The party has been buoyed by a wave of public disaffection with the Conservatives, whose nearly 15 years in power spanned the pandemic and Britain's chaotic exit from the European Union, formalized in 2020.

Over the years, the Conservatives imposed hard-edged austerity measures that have gutted Britain's public sector, including the revered but deeply troubled National Health Service. The Conservative-held prime ministership changed hands repeatedly during the tussle to enact Brexit, culminating in the scandal-plagued reign of Boris Johnson, who stepped down in disgrace in 2022.

Johnson's successors fared little better: First came the hapless Liz Truss, the shortest-serving leader in modern British history, whose 50-day tenure inspired memes of whether she would outlast a wilting head of lettuce, and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called the upcoming vote when it became clear that cratering Conservative support could plunge even further.

The reemergence of Farage — who jumped into the parliamentary race after first saying he would not run — coincides with bruising times for mainstream political leaders elsewhere in Western Europe.

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