To be sick of this "all old people vote Tory" narrative

[WatchoRulo]

There really is no nuance to any debate when people make ill informed claims of this type.

Anecdotally from my friends and family - the only Tory voters are the younger people.

Factually - it's very obviously the case that not everyone over, say, 60 suddenly starts voting Tory.

Also - like the "old people without degrees all voted for Brexit", these claims are based on a statistical extrapolation, often from a very small sample size and are also based entirely on what people who were asked told the researchers. This "data" is from the very same polling organisations that failed to predict the outcome of the referendum, yet somehow some people have accepted their guesses as immutable truths and "facts".

We have a crap FPTP electoral system which means most people don't get what they vote for.

It's a secret ballot - the only way to know for certain the detailed demographics of who votes for what would be to check who actually voted for whom.

I am really fed up of the narrative that as a boomer (aged 60, still working and paying tax and NI by the way) I have deliberately shat on younger people all my life (why would I - I have a teenage DD).

I have personally never voted Tory and consider it vanishingly unlikely I ever would, and I recognise that I've had some lucky breaks from when I was born, but I haven't deliberately stolen from young people.

I agree. I am in my late 60s and have never voted Tory and neither have any of my friends as far as I know. My parents didn't either.

The same goes for Brexit too.

I couldn't agree more.

It's never been true. Likewise that all Tory voters are rich.
The biggest "group" of "swing" voters, as in likely far more to be influenced by what's being offered to them on a personal, not societal level, is the disenchanted working class who haven't been to university and are probably living in the town they grew up in. They comprise both the ones more likely to vote Tory because "it's the immigrants" etc and the ones least likely to vote at all. The Ashfield constituency (my hometown as it happens though I'm not there now) is a case in point. Traditional mining area, Labour could have sent a cauliflower as a candidate and it would have won, for decades and decades. They've now got Lee Anderson. Local lad so gets the loyalty without people digging too deep into what he believes or stands for. High unemployment and poverty so people look to "other".
Someone posted an article saying more or less the above at the last election and I can see it being true. Age has very little to do with it.

*Anecdotally from my friends and family - the only Tory voters are the younger people.

Factually - it's very obviously the case that not everyone over, say, 60 suddenly starts voting Tory.*

Your anecdote is just that and does not actually reflect the statistics.
In the 2019 general election 58% of over 70s voted conservative vs 9% of the same age bracket voting labour.
It follows a neat downwards trend the entire way down to the 18-24 bracket where only 16% voted conservative and 38% labour.

All old people do not vote Tory, however most Tory voters are old.
That is a fact.

You're making my point - that's not a "fact". It's a statistical extrapolation - a guess.

There's a lot of ageism around - casual and deliberate.

It's a bad thing, both in itself, for tending to write people off, and for society as it is divisive.

And nobody really listened when it's pointed out that those old enough to vote in the 1975 referendum backed remain.

There's a lot of "othering" going on - other people's fault, other people's vulnerability etc. I think it has made society much harsher.

This is a great summary of voting by age.
Again it doesn’t mean all older people vote Tory, or obviously why they voted the way they did but there is a clear pattern nonetheless.
The pattern is reversed for labour.
A graph plotting assets would probably be similar and might be more of a driving factor, who knows. It depends whether voters are fiscally or socially conservative by a higher degree.

yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/31/2019-general-election-demographics-dividing-britai

Unless countless over 65s lied to pollsters for years about their tory voting intentions and secretly voted elsewhere in the booth then I think it's fine to say there was clearly a trend in that direction.

What's interesting is how that cohort's tory support has completely collapsed in the past month. That's the real death knell for the government. If they don't have pensioners, they have nothing.

It's a generalisation but not entirely untrue either.

Just like it's not entirely untrue that young people are less likely to vote at all, which is even worse than voting for who you believe in. Even if that happens to mean Tory or Brexit.

Committed Remainer and current Labour voter here, over 60, no degree 👋

No a guess would be why people are more likely to vote conservative as they get older, is it social conservatism, is it asset preservation etc.
Its not a guess to look at the factual data on political party by age in a specific voting event.

www.politicshome.com/news/article/tories-now-more-popular-with-working-class-voters-than-middle-class-ones-reveals-election-poll

I think this was the article.

Same as Brexit OP. My 80 year old DM was shouted at in the street by some students after the result and was quite shaken. She voted Remain.

No - asking 1000 people how they voted and extrapolating that to say it means a given percentage of the entire electorate voted that way is a guess - it's an educated guess, but it's a guess.
It uses the same statistical techniques that failed to predict the outcome of the referendum.
It's a clever guess, not "facts".

The statistics definitely show the older generation are more likely to vote Tory, and SOMEONE must be voting for them (I know a fair few Tories in my 30s demographic though) but in my family the older - over 60s - generation are definitely much more left. I have a relationship with a lot of my mum’s cousins (65-80ish) and they are largely very socialist, one protests with Extinction Rebellion, were as a group largely anti-Brexit…. Anecdote sadly isn’t the same as data because if they represented the larger voting population of their age I think the country would be in a very different situation

It uses the same statistical techniques that failed to predict the outcome of the referendum.

This is a myth - brexit polling got closer and closer as the vote approached until most pollsters finally said it was too close to call. Which, in the end, it was.

Statistical extrapolation is not a “guess”. On a population wide level it will be very accurate. On an individual or even regional level it won’t be, that’s why opinion polls are rarely done even at a constituency level. The extrapolation will also have a small margin of error, and the Brexit referendum was within that, as it was so close. If the statisticians had said remain would win and leave won by a landslide, you’d have a point but it didn’t.

The behaviour of crowds is very easy to predict, the behaviour of an individual not so. They are not trying to predict each individual. It’s about planning on a population wide level.

The other problem is that all such surveys are not properly representative , because the participants are all voluntary.. the worst are those where people sign up to give their option ( so quite a bit of axe grinding) but even the ‘random’ polls rely on people who are willing to participate. I believe that willingness to participate has gone down as it has been over used, there seems to be an ‘opinion’ attached to every purchase . People have survey fatigue

The most representative direct data collection is the census, and that is far less accurate now it relies on people filling it in themselves as opposed to the census taker who could see when gros misrepresentation was taking place.

First of all 11,000 is a pretty good sample size.

And second, are you claiming that every single poll and study done into age and political ties are all false? Because this YouGov poll isn’t an outlier.

You are just coming across wilfully naïve now. So because the old people you know don’t vote Tory you won’t accept any of the masses of data that says the opposite?

As I said, all older people clearly don’t vote Tory but the bigger proportion of Tory voters are older and there is a very clear age trend for both labour and the conservatives.
Deny it if you want but you’re just a fantasist in that case.

A 62-year-old graduate always voted Labour and probably always will and wanted Jezza to win and voted Remain and have hated Brexit from the off. Most Tories are selfish buggers at best with heads full of Daily Maily tropes and at worse Jeremy Hunt's as it were. The young have had a rotten deal in so many ways and the rot began with Thatcher way back when with her "no such thing as society" and the selling off of social housing.

So true. My colleague is in her 60s and she would never vote for Labour. MIL voted for Greens in the last election

She would never vote Tories*

YANBU. I'm 59 and I'm sick of it too. Single mum, working full time.

We seem to have an extraordinary number of people who cannot apply logic, don't bother to check their facts and choose to believe sweeping generalisations.

All the nonsense about final salary pensions as well, ignores the fact that workplace pensions only became compulsory in 2018. A few lucky civil servants may have good pensions but large proportion of the over 50s have no private pension at all. It's a fantasy.

I haven't stolen from anyone. Before I had my ds I volunteered for a search & rescue team for a decade, working with the police. We paid for our own kit, our own insurance, our own petrol. The last Labour government tried to make us pay for our team radio licence as well. They weren't perfect. We turned out in all weathers at all hours for families who were going through the worst moments of their lives. Yet apparently we are parasites on society. It's depressing.

61 year old boomer here, never voted Tory in my life, Remainer through and through. Ditto DH.