Monday 8 June 2015

Who Voted Green at the General Election?

The opinion pollsters got their General Election forecasts hopelessly wrong. So, one of them, YouGov has changed tack and asked after the event who they voted for, which is a safer bet! Seriously though, this study is a massive survey of 100,000 voters, and should have a large degree of accuracy.

We'll look here at Green voters, but the graphics here give the full results of which party got votes from which demographic groups.

Not unsurprisingly, Green voters tended be young, educated and readers of the Guardian and Independent newspapers.

 
The largest group of Green voters are women aged 18 to 29 at 8%. This group was the largest section of the population that voted Labour too.

Across all age groups Green voters were evenly split on gender basis, which is a slight surprise to me as I have thought that our vote was more female than male.

Given that Greens tend to be younger voters, unsurprising they tend to live in privately rented accommodation, with little hope (in London at least) of buying their own home.
 
No surprises here, Green voters are more educated than those, for example, who are attracted to Ukip.
The Greens and Ukip appealed to opposite groups. Ukip’s strongest support came from readers of the Express (27%) and Star (26%) and from people with no qualification beyond GCSE (20%). Green support for these groups was 1-2%. The Greens’ strongest groups were Guardian readers (14%), Independent readers (11%). Ukip support among these groups was 1%, 4% and 6% respectively.

All of this is a concern for the Greens, for although attracting younger voters, bodes well for the future (if they continue to vote Green as they get older), it also demonstrates that we need to break out of our middle class heartlands and gain support from older working class voters. We do have the policies, Living Wage, Building council housing etc. But I feel this will only come once we start fielding more working class candidates.

First published at YouGov

4 comments:

  1. We need to appeal to the male working class, pipe fitters, electricians, builders, pavement layers, sewage workers, fisherman, roofers, painters, car mechanics, fathers. We do nothing at all to attract this very large demographic

    ReplyDelete
  2. A good piece. But wrong to assume that white collar workers, including professionals, are somehow not 'working class'. The horny-handed sons of toil in factories were always a minority within the working class, and they are a smaller minority now. The typical worker is just as likely to be in a call centre. 'Middle Class' is marketing-speak, not analysis.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting to see how people interpret data according to their in-built bias. My take on the last table would be that after 15-20 years of shifting leftwards the Greens have totally failed to attract the working class, in fact they failed to attract almost everyone. With 75% of their support coming from Guardian/Indy readers they've managed to cling onto a small, loyal group of environmental/Greens. Which indicates that they should shift back to their original course.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This the best result we have ever had at a General Election - why should we go back to just being an environmental party? In fact we never were, but nobody noticed.

    ReplyDelete