In this paper, we examine the emergence of the politics of resentment—documented most notably by Cramer (2016) in rural spaces in the United States—in so-called left behind England and its responsibility for altering the electoral coalition of the Conservative Party. Not only are new Conservative voters more likely to have a stronger sense of English national identity (Henderson and Wyn Jones, 2021), they are also more likely to exhibit place-based connections and resentment of the ‘other’. We argue that this resentment—and not populism per se—is the key to understanding recent Conservative electoral success in traditional working-class constituencies. We conclude by considering how the politics of place—and not the culture wars—are critical to the Conservative Party’s future electoral prospects as well as the importance of place in other political contexts.