New PB analysis finds that LAB and UKIP have far more 2010 non-voters amongst current support than either the Tories or Lib Dems
This could have an impact on May 7th 2015
The big Populus/FT online aggregate data for February with an overall sample of 14,203, provides a mine of information presented in a form that makes possible a number of detailed analysis areas which you cannot do with conventional polling data.
One I’ve been looking at overnight is the proportion of non-voters from last time amongst the current support bases. I went into this thinking that UKIP would have the most. In fact after the number crunching I found that LAB is most vulnerable.
This is partly explained by the fact that of the non-2010 voters, those in the 18-24 category, were too young to vote last time and Labour is picking up 52% of them.
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Overall, as the chart shows, one in five of current LAB supporters were 2010 non-voters. That compares with 9% for the Lib Dem, 11% for the Tories and 16% for UKIP.
Farage’s party attracts far fewer young supporters and if you extract the 18-24s from the UKIP and LAB figures has a similar challenge being reliant on a sizeable chunk of those who could have voted last time but didn’t.
I think that this represents a possible problem for both parties because all the evidence is that the best way of assessing whether someone will vote or not is whether they have turned out in the past.