New 18 year old voters have always been more left wing and 90 year old conservatives have always been falling off the perch. That’s not news.
The analysis does not account for people becoming more likely to vote Conservative as they age, but this traditional trend has begun to break down among younger generations.
This is the real story. This is what’s standing on the party’s oxygen tube. The supply of new conservatives has broken down. It turns out that people don’t get more conservative as they age, they get more conservative as they gain wealth - and today’s 30 and 40 year olds aren’t.
This. So much this.
Folks forget that age not only brings wealth but responsibility. Children debts etc. When the 2 are linked, you end up with more of your life working to protect your income/assets from risk. Than you do forming views on the suffering of others.
If you age without wealth but the. Same responsibilities. The suffering of those arrond you is less clearly related to your income and assets. Because you do not have that protection.
So moving right seems less logical to ensure your own respinsibilities are covered.
I think there are actually two distinct factors going on here.
The first is that the traditional rightward shift as you age has broken down among millennials, as you note.
The second - and I actually think this is as if not more important - is that the Tories have abandoned the field on left/right ‘economic-based’ politics anyway. Sunak presided over the highest tax burden in 70 years. The Tories’ post-2016 pitch to the electorate has always been about cultural conservativism - Brexit, immigrants, toilets for trans people, etc - not right-wing economics. And unlike left/right issues, there was never a trend for people to become more culturally conservative as they age. People just form their cultural norms and values when they’re young, and then carry these values with them through life, reacting against things that diverge from their norms.
By abandoning economics for culture wars, the Tories have built their electoral castle out of demographic sand. As the people who grew up in an overwhelming white and insular 1950s and 60s Britain give way to Millennials and Gen Zs who grew up in a ethnically diverse EU member state, the Tories have increasingly set themselves up in opposition to the cultural norms of the British electorate - and that is a stench it’s going to be hard for them to shift.
