Over there

I was looking at the final Ipsos/Mori poll before last week's British election, and saw a remarkable table.  The key figures:

Age        Conservative    Labour
18-24          19%                56%
25-34          28%                49%
35-44          36%                34%
45-54          47%                29%
55-64          53%                26%
65-74          58%                21%
75+             57%                23%

I knew there would be some age differences, but these are extremely large--bigger then education or region.  Usually age differences in party choice represent generation, not age itself--that is, people don't change as they get over.  My rough calculation is that if these generational differences hold, the Conservative lead would disappear in 10 years (other things equal). 


A few other things:

1.  I discovered that Ipsos/Mori has a useful collection of polling trend data.

2.  Many accounts of the election said that it was Labour's worst showing since 1935.  That is true in terms of seats, but not in terms of vote share.  In terms of votes, Labour did worse in 2010 and 2015 (among others) than in 2019.  Labour jumped from 30.4% to 40% in 2017, and fell back to 32.1% in 2019.  Since Jeremy Corbyn was party leader in both 2017 and 2019, this counts against the claim that Labour's defeat in 2019 was because of Corbyn's left-wing policies. 

3.  So should the story be about Boris Johnson?  The Conservatives were up by 1.2% over 2017, while the Liberal Democrats were up by 4.2%, and the Green party was up by 1.1%.  The Scottish National Party was up by 0.9%, which is impressive considering that they run candidates only in Scotland, which has about 1/10 of the population.    So a large part of the story seems to have been a fragmentation of the left of center vote.  With single member constituencies, that meant that the Conservatives picked up seats at Labour's expense in England and the SNP picked up seats at Labour's expense in Scotland.