Where Did the Votes Go?
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A long-running British Election Study (BES) has found that Labour picked up votes from the remain camp based on their ‘soft Brexit’ stance in the June general election. The authors of the report said: “According to our data, the main reason that Labour gained so much in the campaign at the expense of the other parties is the strong performance of Jeremy Corbyn, especially relative to Theresa May.”
The campaigns on all sides prior to the snap election were dominated by talk of the Brexit strategy, and according to the latest set of data, it was the largest concern for voters. Just over a third of the panel asked in the study answered Brexit when asked what they considered the single most important issue when voting, with around 10% each answering the NHS and terrorism. Only one in twenty answered they considered the economy to be a priority.
As for where the votes went, Labour picked up nearly two-thirds of voters who voted for the Green party in 2015, and about a quarter of those who had voted Lib-Dem. The Conservatives picked up 60% of the leave vote, most likely as a result of their ‘hard Brexit’ and ‘Brexit means Brexit’ stances. The Tories also picked up more than half of the UKIP voters from 2015, demonstrating the UKIP’s continues obsolescence since the referendum.