Youth turnout at general election highest in 25 years, data show

Young people turned out to vote in the 2017 UK general election in greater numbers than at any other point for 25 years, according to new analysis by Ipsos MORI.

Some 64 per cent of registered voters aged 18-24 are now thought to have cast a vote on 9 June, the highest share since 67 per cent voted in 1992.

This brings 18-24s into line with the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups, ending two decades of disproportionately low turnout among younger voters.

As recently as 2005 18-24s accounted for only 7 per cent of all votes cast, while over-65s cast 25 per cent of votes. This year that imbalance in electoral power has shrunk, with the youngest voters casting 10 per cent of all votes, and the oldest 23 per cent.

This demographic reshaping of the British electorate could have a profound impact on the way UK political parties think about younger voters when drawing up policies.

For decades a vicious cycle has been in motion: young people do not turn out to vote in large numbers, so politicians do not prioritise their needs when crafting their manifestos — so youth disillusionment with politics grows.

A youth-focused Labour campaign, through both official and unofficial channels, is partly responsible for the uptick in engagement among younger voters, though last year’s EU referendum also played a role.

Turnout among 18-24s for the EU vote was 60 per cent, up from 43 per cent in the previous year’s general election. Research suggests that after somebody has voted once, he or she is much more likely to vote in subsequent elections than those who have had an opportunity to vote and opted not to.

The pivotal role of age in the 2017 election was not limited to turnout. Young voters have always tended to favour Labour and older voters the Conservatives, but what was once a small and steady gap has become a yawning gulf.

In 1987 18-24s preferred Labour to the Conservatives by just two percentage points, while over-65s leaned Tory by 14 points — a net gap of 16. Thirty years on, 18-24s lean Labour by 35 percentage points, and over-65s lean 36 points the other way. This rapid polarisation has created a gap of 71 percentage points.

The impact of age can also be seen in one of the other traditional measures of political polarisation: housing tenure.

Traditionally, homeowners have tended to vote Conservative in greater numbers than the electorate as a whole, those in social housing have voted overwhelmingly for Labour and private renters have favoured Labour to a lesser degree.

The gap between owner-occupiers and private renters had been narrowing up until 2010, at which point the former favoured the Tories by 13 percentage points and the latter by 6 points. But this month while owner-occupiers voted in largely the same way — leaning Tory by 14 points — private renters favoured Labour by 23 points. In total, the tenure gap has widened in seven years from 7 to 37 points.

Key to understanding both the growing age and tenure divides is the close link between age and home ownership.

The coincidence of rising house prices with a recent stagnation in wages means it is more difficult than ever before for young people to get on the housing ladder. A Resolution Foundation analysis found that by age 27, Britons born in 1988 earned the same — in teal terms — as those born 25 years earlier. As a result, “30-year-old millennials have lower home-ownership rates than the baby boomers did at age 24”, wrote Laura Gardiner, a senior policy analyst at the think-tank and the report’s author.

As with young voters, the 2017 election also saw turnout increase sharply among private renters — from 51 to 65 per cent. This is a promising sign, according to Ms Gardiner.

“Turnout among private renters has historically been low, allowing politicians to ignore the votes that wouldn’t get cast anyway”, she says. “But something has changed. For one, housing — and housing conditions for those unable to buy — has risen up the political agenda. Second it seems that Labour may have finally mobilised the votes of often young, private renters to strengthen their vote share.

“If private renters become an increasingly vote-wielding demographic, that’s a welcome trend that both parties will need to respond to.”

Education is a third wedge being driven between the red and blue shares of British voters, and has become so at a remarkably fast rate. According to a pair of YouGov analyses, in just two years the Lab/Con preference gap among graduates has gone from one percentage point in favour of the Conservatives to 17 points pro-Labour.

Meanwhile, those with only a GCSE (or equivalent) or below have gone from preferring the Conservatives over Labour by eight percentage points to 22.

Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at Bristol university, proposes one theory for the growing significance of education: that its emergence as a battle line in the EU referendum gave a sharp boost to its political salience.

Michael Gove’s now infamous line that “people in this country have had enough of experts” was certainly seen by many as an attack on intellectualism, and both Mr Gove’s status as a prominent Conservative figure and the close geographical association between the Leave vote and Conservative performances in the general election could have served to sustain education’s prominence in voters’ decision-making process.

But if age, housing and education are emerging as new frontiers in British politics, one dividing line losing its edge is social class.

The Conservatives fared best this year in the most working-class areas of the country, due in large part to their capture of the majority of 2015 UK Independence party voters. Meanwhile Labour made inroads among highly educated and middle-class voters.

As a result, the class divide between the two parties has shrunk. In the October 1974 general election, middle-class voters favoured the Conservatives over Labour by 40 percentage points, while the most working-class share of the electorate went Labour by 32 points: a net gap of 72. This year those margins were 3.5 per cent pro-Conservative and 12 per cent pro-Labour respectively, for a gap of 15.5 points — around a fifth of what it once was.