At every election, politicians seem to obsess over a different group of voters. In 2019, it was northern voters in so-called ‘red wall’ seats. In 2017, it was the ‘youthquake’ voters. In 2015, it was ‘shy Tories’. But were any of these groups actually pivotal?
In a new research paper, we answer that question by looking at the data. This systematic approach shows us how many votes each demographic group actually contributed to a party in a given election. It also helps identify which demographic groups are likely to contribute more votes to a given party in the future.
To do this, we collected two types of data, for every general election from 1983 to 2019. From census data, we collected the size of each demographic group; and from survey data, we got the turnout percentage for each group, and the percentage that voted for a given party. We multiplied these three numbers to find the total number of votes that each party earned from a given demographic group.
