In journalism, there’s a saying: when the subject of an article is THAT good, sometimes the headline just writes itself. Well, Canary readers – this is one of those stories. Because a YouGov data analyst has provisionally revealed that of the people who voted Tory in 2019, more of them DIED than voted for the Labour Party at 4 July’s general election. However, while amusing, the Labour election result data from YouGov actually has a serious side.
Labour election result: more Tory deaths than right-wing switchers
YouGov junior data journalist Dylan Difford shared some very interesting but also provisional data from the polling company:
Flow of the vote, 2019-24, provisional version (will wait for the BES data to be released to make a final version, plus some deeper cuts). pic.twitter.com/gktfPn0mgu
— Dylan Difford (@Dylan_Difford) July 15, 2024
The obvious headline figure from the data is that 1.4 million people who voted Tory in 2019 have since died – while 1.1 million switched to vote Labour in 2024. While that figure alone seems shocking – it’s not entirely unsurprising either. As Novara’s Aaron Bastani pointed out:
8% of 2019 Tory voters switching Labour is not nothing.
But it’s pretty insane that a higher percentage of them (10%) died. The demographics of their vote, obvious for so long, is coming to bite. I suspect it’ll be the same at the next election too. https://t.co/tEDx1YiOYh
— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) July 16, 2024
But aside from the facts that a) the Tories’ erstwhile approach of appealing just to older people has literally and metaphorically died, and b) Labour’s shift to the right wing was completely pointless – there’s actually more interesting data to be drawn than that.
In short:
- Labour lost more voters to the centre and left than they gained from the right – by about 600,000.
- The Lib Dems gained more Tory votes than Labour did – showing their strategy of targetting affluent areas paid off.
- More 2019 Tory voters did not cast their ballots than Labour ones – but only by about 300,000.
- Far from a Labour wipeout of the SNP, it actually only picked up 200,000 of the party’s 2019 voters.
A pointless exercise in so-called democracy
However, in reality these are the headline figures from the YouGov analysis:
- 12.8 million people who did not vote in 2019 did not vote again.
- Two million young people voting for the first time actually didn’t even bother.
- 1.4 million people who voted Labour in 2019 did not vote this time around.
- Only 300,000 people who didn’t vote in 2019 voted in 2024 for Reform, and 100,000 first time voters did as well.
YouGov’s analysis ties into what we already know. As the Guardian reported, think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said the 2024 election had the lowest turnout since 1928 – just 52% of people who could vote, did.
However, this election was also about ethnicity and class – with the two going hand-in-hand:
The IPPR report also found that seats where a larger share of the population were older people, wealthy homeowners and white had much higher turnout rates than constituencies where a smaller share of people came from those demographics.
It calculated that turnout was 11% higher in constituencies with the highest proportion of over 64-year-olds, compared with the lowest. Turnout was also 13% higher in constituencies with the highest proportion of homeowners.
In terms of ethnicity and religion, turnout was 7% lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds, compared with the lowest, and 10% lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of Muslim people.
So, it seems neither Labour nor even Reform, complete with Nigel’s Farage’s preposterous ‘man of the people’ clown show, gave the poorest people in the UK anything worth voting for.
Labour and the rest of them: disenfranchising us
Not that the trend of poorer people not voting is new. As the Canary has documented, since around 2015 poor people have been voting less and less in general elections year-on-year – with the trend even continuing when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party.
It shouldn’t need us to tell you why this is. The UK’s political and financial systems and their proponents have intentionally disenfranchised the poorest people from our democracy – because our corporate capitalist system does not work in their interests. For it to function, those who it abuses the most need to be subjugated the most – otherwise, the whole thing would fall apart.
So, while the funny side of the YouGov polling is that more 2019 Tories died than voted Labour in 2024 – what is actual dead is the idea of UK democracy, if it was even alive in the first place.
Featured image via the Canary
