The EU referendum: A battle between the social classes
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The most affluent are more solidly for IN
The above breakdown is from the latest ComRes referendum poll and shows how different socio-economic groups responded to the 16 word referendum question.
The pattern shown is very similar in most referendum polls.
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The more affluent you are, the higher the social class in which you are categorised, the more likely you are to say that you want to remain within the EU.
This applies in both phone and online polls and generally the split is that ABC1 voters are more for in and those in C2 D and E are more for out.
A problem that BREXIT has is that most of its support comes from the lower socioeconomic groups and there’s evidence to suggest these are less likely to turn out in elections than they say they are going to do.
Indeed in its methodology review following the 2015 General Election polling disaster ComRes identified the lower socio-economic groups overstating their voting intention certainty as a big reason why the polls were wrong.
ComRes now includes a new adjustment in its General Election polls that weights down the the voting certainty responses from those who are less affluent.
It its referendum polls it is not, however, showing this adjustment in the headline figures. The impact can be quite considerable.
The March ComRes ITV poll had the IN lead down to 7%. If it had applied its voter turnout model that would have been a margin of 14%.
Will the same pattern be seen on June 23rd? That’s hard to say but the polling numbers we need to be following closely are the socio-economic segment splits. LEAVE needs to make inroads amongst the ABC1s.
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