This is from YouGov:
And the unfortunate fact is that the young still did not turn out as much as hoped, but the elderly did:
But Labour now knows what it has to do.
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the old must really be behind the dementia tax then.
All geriatrics should be strangled at birth.
In poor taste but I get your humour
There is a big message to be sent by the Left to the elderly as well: how do they think they’re going to be cared for by a shrunken state?
Maybe it is a case of the older you get the more ossified the myths become in your mind.
I’m reminded of Dylan Thomas:
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
Fortunately that is probably a dead duck.
Labour has got its work cut out.
The elderly are substantially more limited in where they can get information on politics from. Many do not have the access or basic technical knowledge to source information online, and I suspect the elderly are much more likely to read the rag prints which overwhelmingly peddle an shamelessly biased pro-Tory, anti-Labour narrative. Many are living in a political echo chamber where they are only really told one story. Perhaps this will change over time as today’s more tech savvy younger generations as they grow older, but it seems unlikely to change any time soon.
I also recall reading some interesting research published in the wake of the Brexit referendum which made the case that critical and mathematical ability declines in the elderly, they tend to overestimate their expertise more than younger generations, and they are more attracted to right-wing authoritarianism than younger generations:
https://www.onlineprivacyfoundation.org/opf-research/psychological-biases/psychology-and-the-eu-referendum-update/
Unfortunately, these issues all work to the advantage of the Tories, and there is not really anything that can be done to address them.
There is also this: https://www.indy100.com/article/sun-readers-vote-newspaper-election-conservative-ukip-labour-turnout-yougov-exit-poll-7789206?utm_source=indy&utm_medium=top5&utm_campaign=i100
“Many are living in a political echo chamber where they are only really told one story”
That does sound grim.
There are loads of elderly people online! Everyone I know in their seventies is online.
*As today’s more tech savvy younger generations grow older
I’ve calculated, based on YouGov’s data, LAB (CON) vote % estimates for those aged
<30: 63 (22)
<40: 59 (25)
<50: 54 (30)
<60: 50 (34)
<70: 44 (40)
If not for those aged over 70 voting against the wishes of their children and grandchildren, and in larger numbers, we would almost certainly have Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn preparing to answer questions next Wednesday.
I've also estimated that in about 2 years, assuming the Conservatives don't win over any Labour voters, they will lose their vote lead due to new 18/19-year-old Labour voters replacing dying Conservative voters.
I don’t quite see why anyone thinks people will stop shifting right as they get older
They do, and still will, I fear
I’ve assumed any votes gained via the ageing process are lost via shambolic government. I should’ve inserted the word ‘net’ there somewhere!
Yes, but if elderly can be shown the dangers to them and their families (children and grandchildren) from shifting to the right it may make them think twice about voting for rightwing ideology.
Also climate change, peak everything, the rise of automation owned by the top 0.1% and the none zero chance of WW3 means we cannot afford to wait for current youngsters to grow old, avoid becoming right-wing and then vote in a progressive government.
Richard you make an excellent point about who is going to look after the elderly. They think what they need is savings and a government “balancing the budget”.
They completely fail to recognise that they only way a small number of youngsters can support a large number of geriatrics is if the youngsters are very, very productive. High productivity is not achieved by running down education, healthcare, policing, infrastructure investment and investment in R&D.
This is a message I’m going to be trying to get across to any elderly voters I speak to in the future.
It is vital
Well, I am over 75 and have moved from Left/Anarchist at 21 to Green at 44 and still Green at 78. Glad I have avoided going Tory.
But you’re the exception Bill
erm… me, another exception – I’ve moved from flip flop tory/labour to left of labour (actually I was a green in my student days – wierd eh?)
I’ve definitely moved further to the Left as I’ve grown older (now 71). But I know so many who have ossified – including intelligent people with a good education. I suspect it’s nostalgia – ‘the golden summers when we were young.’
Mind you, when I was 21 I gave a daisy chain I’d made to George Brown, who immediately placed it around his bowler hat and was photographed wearing it in Downing Street.
Definitely nostalgia…
🙂
I seem to have moved further to the left as I’ve got older. the only other person of whom that has been written, to the best of my knowledge, was Mao.
Either that, or i have stayed still and the world has moved to the right.
I never know which if those happened to me
I think it may be both
Oh, me too.
You got a brain Bill!, too many old farts still think It’s the 1950s, you know, I could out and get a job in the morning and change it the afternoon and still have threepence for a pork pie and pint of bitter, kids today, bring back birching and national service.
There may be some hope for the next election, whenever that is! Many of the young people who didn’t vote probably did so because they believed it was a lost cause – but they have been shown by this result that they CAN effect change. One can only hope the youth turnout at the next election will be greater still!
I appreciate that Labour received significant votes from the longer generation especially in Uni towns. However my comment is that unless the pollster sits next to anyone when they vote mis information can be obtained. If you ask a normal group of students I suspect many people, especially in front of people, will just say they voted Labour. In particular on this occasion tuition fees being a policy by Labour.
I personally have only once being asked how I would vote. I declined to give an answer on that occasion. The only survey that is 100% correct is the actual vote.
Of course
But 50,000 is a lot of people and likely to give a good insight
Remember that was the size of the exit poll and it was pretty good
The elderly are more inclined to believe the lies in the MSM.
Interesting. In Canterbury, where my son was involved in getting students registered to vote, somebody has been putting up posters demanding that the “voting age must raised to 25”. Some of the students have added their own addendum to the bottom of the posters saying “….and capped at 50”.
I like the latter….but not wholeheartedly
One thing I find interesting in the data is that those with an education level of GCSE or below voted 55/39 for Con/Lab. For degree level or higher it was almost the reverse. I think its uncontroversial to say that lower education level is (on average) associated with lower incomes, and it’s also true to say that the last seven years have seen lower income groups affected the most. So the question is, how are the Tories so successful in attracting this group, which should in theory be labour core? A friend of mine recently said ‘aspiration’, but I don’t see the mechanism.
I don’t see that link
I see that they’re more susceptible to propaganda being less trained to identify it
The also are more willing to buy the household analogy
Steve, it’s mainly because older people are less likely to have further/higher education qualifications.
I found the raw data and answered my own question, it’s related at least in part to age. However, the point remains that socioeconomic grades c2de are overall Conservative voters.
I’m told by my 19 and 24 year old children (who both voted Remain/Labour) that this 94 year old has become an icon:
https://twitter.com/Harryslaststand
Harry is brilliant
I really recommend his book
In fairness, he’s kind enough to recommend mine
But he is staggering
Got to be poor parenting of the retired generation who were not encouraged to think analytically and independently. Shades of George Lakoff’s book “Moral Politics” and right-wing authoritarian parenting.
The following has just appeared in my local free sheet, written by the Conservative chairman:
“I would urge all those who voted for (name of new Con MP) to remind their neighbours, and those under 30 years old, that the UK, like other countries, has tried the Corbyn style of socialism. Neither here nor anywhere else in the world, has it worked.”
Any hints on how I can respond?
The Corbyn style of socialism is fat used in the UK list WW2
It gave us the NHS
Motorways
Decent pensions
Full employment
Stable growth
No crashes
Large scale house building
And real increases in income
It worked
And was nothing like Soviet communism not least because it always embraced democracy
They really do need to get their facts right
I can’t find readily available, age-related turnout figures for the 2015 election but in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the youth turnout in 2017 we should at least compare the two figures to see the rate of change.
What we may be able to conclude, however, is that it was not the number (or proportion)of voting youth that made the significant difference but the way that they voted.
The difference between the YouGov 2017 Vote By Age figures (above) the their Vote By Age figures for 2015 is astonishing. Check it out.
See link below for equivalent data from 2015:
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/06/08/general-election-2015-how-britain-really-voted/
That is an amazing shift
Update:
According to the BBC, IpsosMori estimated a 44% turnout of 18-24 year olds in 2015. If we compare that with YouGov’s roughly 59% for the same group in 2017 that’s a remarkable rate of increase.
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40220032
Then again, these are two different pollsters with different samples and methodologies so its not a clean comparison. If it is remotely indicative it is remarkable nonetheless.
Unfortunately that comparison does not tell us anything about turnout for all the other twenty and thirtysomethings. The data in this piece from the The Conversation is methodoligically different yet again but more broadly useful and vaguely supportive of the YouGov/Ipsos comparison.
http://theconversation.com/general-election-results-werent-down-to-youth-turnout-alone-79438
That said, it would be generally safe to say that the greater turnout was significant but it was the way that people voted that made the greater difference and that is something that the Labour campaign can be proud of.
Not sure if you saw this in the FT Richard. From the age chart it appears that polarisation by age is at a peak. So the natural increase in conservatism with age may not be enough to drag the currently Lettie young far enough right to be Tories in their older years. Although maybe the rate of change will just be greater.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/dac3a3b2-4ad7-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af89b
Where the pundits went wrong was to dismiss the number of people registering to vote in the runup to the election. Taking just the 18/19 group nearly a quarter of a million registered on the last day, over half a million in the last week and over a million between the election being called and the cutoff date. for under 44s, nearly 2.5 million registered to vote. To assume that so many would register and then not vote seems to me the height of folly. The figures were all available, https://www.gov.uk/performance/register-to-vote/registrations-by-age-group#from=2017-01-01T00:00:00Z&to=2017-06-01T00:00:00Z
On the shift to the right with age thing (and partly in response to Alberto), I’m wondering about the effect of education?
I was quite struck by just how old you have to be (in the comparative sense, i.e. not wishing to offend) for the Tory vote to dominate. My own grandparents left school at 14 and went straight into work. They were deeply racist and by the time I was about 16 I could see they had a pretty uninformed and unreflected view of the world. They were Tory voters. My parents are better educated and whilst we may disagree on many things they are more reflective than their parents were.
You don’t really get mass higher education until about the mid-1990s on. So, is this starting to filter through? According to the graphs this cohort is the last one (going upwards in age) that did not predominantly vote Tory.
This of course is based on the assumption that generally speaking you develop much better critical thinking if you have attended some kind of higher education. Also worth bearing in mind how different the workplace has become – requires a lot more information-processing than it did for my grandparents’ generation.
According to some research I saw somewhere (can’t remember where now) after UKIP voters, Tory voters are the least educated (33% have higher education). Green are at the top with about 75% if memory serves me correctly.
Maybe all is not lost – question is how long can we wait?
Work on it is the answer….
Those graphs are remarkably monotonic.
So people in all age groups under the age of 50 were less likely to vote than average, and people in all age groups over the age of 50 were more likely to vote than average.
According to the ONS, the median age is 40, with the lower quartile at 21 and the upper quartile at 58. To put it another way, about a quarter of the population are too young to vote (18 is not 21, but more or less). The next quarter (20 to 40) are less likely to vote, but more likely to vote Labour, the third quarter (40 to 60) is reasonably evenly balanced, but top quartile (60+) are much more likely to vote, and much more likely to vote Conservative.
I wonder if gender might be a factor too. Above age 70, the number of males to females falls below 90%, and drops rapidly (40% at age 90+).