I've always found the Lord Ashcroft polls interesting. Although he is a Tory, he does a good job of being impartial and gathering valuable data and stats.
Someone posted about his work in another thread, but it's buried under all the conversations, so I've decided to put it in a separate thread for discussion.
Maybe it's not particularly suited to a feminist forum but since we are currently having discussions around the election results, it seems like a reasonable thing to post.
lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-general-election-post-vote-poll/
As a complete amateur, I've been looking at the very first graph and wondering.....
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We know this election has been a sort of re-run of the Brexit referendum, so let's assume a vote for Conservative or Brexit Party is most likely a vote for Leave.
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A vote for LibDem, SNP, Green or Labour is generally a vote for Remain or at least a fairly soft Brexit.
I say this because the very last graph asks how people would vote if Brexit wasn't an issue and most voters would still stick to their choices, so although a small percentage would move around, I'm naively going with a simple correlation between elected party and view on Brexit.
I'm ignoring the Other category as it seems like a random bunch that could be either Leave or Remain.
Would that be a correct way of looking at the data?
With that in mind....
Conservative and Brexit got 47% while Labour, LD, SNP, Green got 52%.
Seems like overall there's no desire for Brexit or a particularly hard one?
Men are more likely to vote Conservative than Labour.
The male vote is 50% for Conservative and Brexit; and 49% for Labour, LD, SNP, Green.
The female vote is 44% for Conservative and Brexit; and 54% for Labour, LD, SNP, Green.
Every age group apart from 55 onwards shows more support for Labour, LD, SNP, Green than Conservative + Brexit.
I could not find an explanation of what the codes for the socioeconomic groups were, but of the four types, only the C2 category has more votes for Conservative and Brexit Party.
If we ignore the Leave/Remain angle entirely, it still begs the question of why the Conservatives have such a large number of seats and are hailed as the party with a mandate to lead the country when the vast majority do not want them or their policies? How is this democratic?