United Kingdom General Election 2024 : (Date to be confirmed)

[Wiswylfen]

It is worth repeating, for those unfamiliar with British politics and polling, that the Reform % in polling is far ahead of what it actually is, as repeated poor by-election results have shown. These are the by-elections since their jump in the polls in late 2022, followed by the by-elections following UKIP's rise in the polls and their results in those against the 2015 GE result.


Constituency; UKIP 2015; Reform by-election

City of Chester; 8.1%; 2.7%
Stretford and Urmston; 10.9%; 3.5%
West Lancashire; 12.2%; 4.4%
Selby and Ainsty; 14.0%; 3.7%
Somerton and Frome; 10.7%; 3.4%
Rutherglen and Hamilton West; 2.3%; 1.3%
Mid Bedfordshire; 15.4%; 3.7%
Tamworth; 18.5%; 5.4%


Constituency; UKIP by-election; UKIP 2015

Eastleigh; 27.8%; 15.8%
South Shields; 24.2%; 22.0%
Wythenshawe and Sale East; 18.0%; 14.7%
Newark; 25.9%; 12.0%
Clacton; 59.7%; 44.4%
Heywood and Middleton; 38.7%; 32.2%
Rochester and Strood; 42.1%; 30.5%


Something's just not adding up.

[Wiswylfen]

Well, Wales has the popular backlash to 20mph, and Scotland has tactical unionist voting for the Tories in parts of the country where Labour is very weak.

Really? I thought that was in Sunderland.

[Wiswylfen]

Anyway, what is true regardless is that a certain proportion of people over a certain age (not everyone! Not a majority! Not close to it!) did very well out of now phased-out workplace pension schemes and consequentially swung about a mile to the right on retirement.

Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that every British-based poster here will know at least one person like this, and probably multiple.

Can't say I do.

[Wiswylfen]

YouGov have some polling in various demographic groups; see the Twitter thread starting below for details.

https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1752281504728707076
- the usual ridiculous age divide
- something of an education divide, though note that this seems to be mostly among older voters
- weak gender gap
- little effect of "class" (though of course they mean the dubious ABCDE system)

Caveat: I don't know how well weighted these samples are. Caveat 2: as usual I suspect Reform UK are over-polled (but note how like Tories their supporters look).

So assuming I'm reading this correctly (I might not be) the Tories are 4th amongst under 40's? Wow. How on earth do they expect to win elections going forward?

They haven't understood that they're going to die yet.

[Wiswylfen]

Would love to meet some Labour 2019/Tory 2024 voters. Who even are they? Accelerationists? Mark Latham imitators? Idiots? Leicester East?

Someone who was an apolitical 22-year old student in 2019 (probably opposed to Brexit) and is now an apolitical 27-year old consultant making decent money (while Brexit is irrelevant). Many such cases.

It is fascinating how poorly you understand English politics. An apolitical 27-year-old consultant making decent money has literally no reason whatsoever to vote Conservative.

[Wiswylfen]

One big question mark - which I haven't seen much discussion about - is the extent to which unhappy 2019 Conservative voters who now claim to be voting for Reform will, in the end, 'come home' for the Tories when they start looking at their own constituency more than at the national picture.

Most '2019 Conservative voters who now claim to be voting for Reform' are a mirage caused by sampling issues related to the fact that overly online pensioners (and older people in general) tend to be absurdly right-wing. They barely saved their deposit in Rochdale: it's not happening. But I guess when the GE does happen we'll all get this narrative instead of the reality that they never existed to begin with so whatever.

In the past, this sort of thing has worked out rather well for the Conservatives. Perhaps this time it won't because the election doesn't seem particularly competitive at this point, and perhaps many of these Reform/Tory swing voters are concentrated in Northern seats that will go Labour anyway this time, but it's a matter to watch.

There is literally no sign of this whatsoever.

If I were a voter in the UK, I can imagine I'd currently be enraged with the Tories' record in government (particularly its most recent iterations) and if a pollster were to call me today I'd certainly not say I'd vote for them. But chances are that if my seat would be even semi-marginal, Reform wouldn't stand a chance there, and my Tory MP or candidate would be decent, I'd end up voting Conservative anyway, despite everything.

Yes actually you are correct you would. Of course until recently you thought it an excellent idea to align yourself with an utterly deranged conspiracy theorist, and are overall one of the least interesting right-wingers on the Atlas forum, which offers a better look at the Conservatives' existing young voters than your absurd fiction in which "an apolitical 27-year old consultant making decent money" has any reason to vote for the party at all.

[Wiswylfen]

What young people do vote Tory?

Young 'political hobbyists' who didn't fully understand that their vehicle of choice was going to break down within twenty years. That's about it, really; also people trying desperately to Be Normal (you'll find them in a few places on Reddit) failing to understand that voting Conservative is the direct opposite of that. The actual 'upper class', too.

If you're young and you vote Tory you do if for cultural reasons, or because you're insanely online.

'Cultural reasons' in the class sense yes, otherwise (and the 'insanely online') no. Young, ideological right-wingers in England have as little love for the Conservative Party as anyone else, if not less. Just pure hatred.

[Wiswylfen]

If you're young and you vote Tory you do if for cultural reasons, or because you're insanely online.

'Cultural reasons' in the class sense yes, otherwise (and the 'insanely online') no. Young, ideological right-wingers in England have as little love for the Conservative Party as anyone else, if not less. Just pure hatred.

There are a decent number of young Tories who hate the current incarnation of the Tory party, they just vote that way because they can't contemplate doing otherwise.

Is there really? A few years ago there might have been a few of them but it seems like all of them have now left.

[Wiswylfen]

So who do Gen Zers in the UK who are from extremely wealthy aristocratic families who went to places like Eton and hang out in Sloan Square all vote for these days?

People like that will be fairly Tory regardless of their age group, but outside of certain parts of central London there really aren't very many of them.

I would imagine that your typical young Tory voter is someone from a Tory family who follows the family voting habit and doesn't see enough of a reason to change. There are surely also a few libertarian ideologues out there, or are they Reform or trying to infiltrate the Lib Dems again?

Yes, and in much of London they've been replaced by foreign millionaires (and their families) with ill-gotten gains. Hence why Labour was able to win Kensington in 2017, rather than some sort of mass defection among the people formerly known as the Sloanes.

I don't think people really get the young right. The young, ideological, *actual* right has no interest in the Conservative Party: even the idea of hijacking it to serve as a vehicle for their own ends is a fringe one. They also have very little time for Reform: they like Farage, but not Tice and his circus, and even have a cautious willingness to support George Galloway. The only young people 'on the right' who feel attached to the Conservative Party are media personalities and careerists who want to be politicians. This is the depth of the hole they've dug.

[Wiswylfen]

If only there were young Tory voters on this board that we could actually speak to in order to find out how and why they vote.

Ones who talk about voting for Labour and standing for Reform?

[Wiswylfen]

If only there were young Tory voters on this board that we could actually speak to in order to find out how and why they vote.

Ones who talk about voting for Labour and standing for Reform?

In other words: trolls.

Can be too careful: I know of some very right-wing (ex-)Conservatives who voted Labour in 1997.

[Wiswylfen]

We can get her. We will get her if the people running the campaign quit reminiscing about how, actually, campaigning during the 1997 election in seats which in 1992 we had lost by less than a hundred votes was what won it.

[Wiswylfen]

How much danger is Truss actually in?

Hard to say. The seat has a marginal history, but that is really a long time ago and its recent results make it look like a seat the Tories ought to hold even in a real meltdown. However I suspect that Truss is genuinely a liability even in her constituency and Bagge does seem to be getting some traction. So there's a possibility he could split the Tory vote and let Labour through the middle or, if he can attract tactical votes, potentially challenge to win himself, but it's very hard to judge how much traction a candidate like that is getting from outside and there is not much history of similar candidates having an impact. (But there also isn't much history of the Tories polling in the low 20s...)

If you're thinking of the 60s and before, that *is* really a long time ago--but then, not so long ago, there's '97's 42.0% vs 37.8%, and the Tories are doing even *worse* now...

And that 1997 result was with Gillian Shephard, almost certainly more locally regarded than Truss is now. Against that, however, Labour's 1997 Norfolk GE results (together with remarkably strong local election performances in the previous few years) were in hindsight maybe the last gasp of the former rural agricultural vote that had once been enough to elect MPs there until 1970.

So structurally, it is a safer Tory seat now than ever before.

But if anybody can mess that up, maybe Lizzie can.

Was there anything of that vote left by 1997? Its death was remarkably swift and, with Beeching, killed off Labour in most of the countryside.

[Wiswylfen]

Some older voters would still have been around in the 1990s, surely - and many may well have been the types to have gone over to the Tories in the 1970s/80s but returned for one last Labour hurrah.

The thing is, the end was swift and thorough; the agricultural Labour vote ended up either moving away or into the towns, where it's a question of how much of it was down to that heritage and how much of it down to the fact that, well, in a Labour landslide King's Lynn is going to be able to outvote the rest provided the estates turn out (which they didn't in 2001).