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.
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.
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.
Oh, what a pity.
I’ve heard people say both “young people are more politically conscious than ever” and also “young people are more disengaged/disillusioned from democracy than ever”
Whilst those things can both be true, I think it’s v important now to try and get young people actively engaged with politics.
But also - we should keep trying to get older generations to be kinder, too.
I’ve been told “your generation will make the world right again!” by the generations above mine, since I was in primary school. 20 years later, we’re still waiting for conservatives to die off. If climate change has proven anything, it’s that we should all be doing more than just waiting it out
That “assuming nothing else changes” is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.
Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people’s rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.
Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.
Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That’s the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you’d gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they’d have laughed in your face. But it happened.
But that’s the whole problem. People haven’t been turning Tory as they get older. So the Tory base is aging out of the population.
The Torys probably have at least another term of crazy, before they get their ship in order. They’ll have some new “hug a hoodie” centrist leader and stop being so visibly the naughty party.
