The collapse of the Conservative vote on Thursday did not just bring 14 years of Tory rule to a brutal end. It destroyed the new coalition of voters that the party had assembled five years ago, and seemed set to help the party dominate 21st century Britain as successfully as it dominated the 20th century.
The party’s plight is laid bare by analysis of 53,000 voters questioned during the election campaign by Focaldata, a research technology company. It finds that Conservative support collapsed most among
- Homeowners
- “C2” voters – the skilled working class
- Those who backed Leave in the Brexit referendum eight years ago
- Voters without university degrees
- Voters over 45
The significance of these overlapping groups becomes clear when we set the data in their historical context. The Tory dominance of British politics in the 1980s owed much to the way the party broke out of its traditional middle-class base. Margaret Thatcher came to power when C2 voters switched decisively from Labour to Conservative. She consolidated her support by turning council tenants into home-owners and giving millions a stake in capitalism by selling shares in state-owned industries.
Under Tony Blair, Labour revived its fortunes by accepting most of the Thatcher reforms, while winning support from the rapidly growing numbers of socially liberal graduates. The long-term decline of jobs and votes in heavy industry started to offset Labour’s gains but not enough to remove Labour from power until 2010.
Starting with David Cameron, and reaching its peak under Boris Johnson in 2019, the Conservatives revived the Thatcher’s economic appeal, also adding a more liberal approach to social issues such as gay marriage.
Brexit seemed to seal the deal with the electorate. Johnson’s big victory five years ago combined continuing success among the voters in the shires with big gains in the former industrial “red wall” areas whose pro-Brexit voters felt neglected by Labour. To take a pair of contrasting examples, the Tories gained the old steel town of Leave-voting Scunthorpe last time, at the same time as it held prosperous Remain-voting Wokingham.
In fact their majorities fell in seats such as Wokingham in 2019, but they had been so large that the party could afford to lose some Remain voters to the Liberal Democrats and still win comfortably. By shedding surplus better-off homeowners in their Southern strongholds, while harvesting working-class Leave voters in the Midlands and North, the Tories rebalanced their support and ended up with their 80-seat majority.
At the heart of this victory was a gamble: that the new Tory voters that allowed the party to sweep the red wall would not just outnumber the traditional supporters that were slipping away, but that these converts would stay loyal, and become a solid section of a winning 21st century Conservative coalition.
Last week the gamble failed on both fronts. The new pro-Brexit Tories proved to be fickle, and the middle-class moderates unforgiving. Focaldata’s findings show how the Conservative dream of 2019 became the nightmare of 2024. Consider first their collapse among Leave voters in red wall seats such as Scunthorpe: “In contrast to the 2019 election when Leave voters more or less united behind the Conservatives, this time around the Leave vote was heavily split, with the Conservatives picking up a third, 27 per cent going to Reform and 23 per cent going to Labour.”
As for blue-wall seats such as Wokingham, the affordable slippage of Tory support among middle-class Remainers in 2019 became a mass revolt by the older one-nation homeowners that the party had relied on for decades. According to Focaldata, “with every age group over 45, the Conservatives lost more than 25 points, compared to their 2019 result.” Moreover, “the Conservatives fell to just 34 per cent of the vote with those that owned their home outright, dropping 26 points since 2019”.
All this enabled Labour to regain a swathe of red-wall seats such as Scunthorpe without adding much to their own national vote, and the Liberal Democrats to gobble up dozens of blue-wall seats such as Wokingham.
At the same time, Focaldata’s research has sobering lessons for Labour. The report says “Labour gained with over 40s nationally, but actually went backwards on 2019 with voters under 30. The party seemingly had a particular issue in this election with women under 35, dropping 9 points.” Labour also struggled to exploit a strongly anti-Tory mood among the youngest voters. Turnout was low; moreover, “the Greens picked up 14 per cent of the vote with 18-24 year-olds, up 10 points on 2019”.
In short, Focaldata’s report has sobering lessons for both main parties. Labour has the happier, though still tricky, task of converting its fragile landslide into a more solid future base. The Tories have a more existential challenge. Their triumph in 2019 was broad but shallow. Their new coalition disintegrated as they lost their trump card, a reputation for economic competence. Last week, they were deserted by the Leave voters they acquired after 2016, while their better-off moderates continued to drift away. They now need to rethink their appeal from first principles.
Meanwhile, pollsters have challenges of their own. They got the big picture right: Labour’s landslide, Reform’s rise, the success of the Lib Dems in the blue wall and the SNP’s sharp decline. However, they all overstated Labour’s 10-point lead, with a newcomer, Norstat, coming closest, predicting a 13-point gap. On average, the final polls overstated Labour’s victory by eight points. One possible reason is that Labour suffered from the sharp drop in turnout. Did more of the party’s apparent supporters – especially among the under 30s – stay at home than the pollsters were expecting?
The MRP surveys that predicted seat numbers also inflated Labour’s victory, though some came close. Stonehaven’s final prediction came within ten seats for Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. More in Common and YouGov also did well, overstating Labour’s 412-seat haul by just 18 and 19 respectively, Survation had the unhappiest night, having predicted a 318-seat majority, with the Tories slumping to just 64 seats.
In contrast, Ipsos’s exit poll for the broadcasters was a triumph. At 10pm on Thursday it forecast a Labour majority of 170, impressively close to the final outcome of 174.
This blog updates an analysis first published by the Sunday Times
Peter Kellner. The Politics Counter 