What might mess up Tory strategy – Brexit is a much much bigger deal for CON voters than LAB ones
Why Brexit is much less of an issue for the red team
We have covered this before on PB but it is worth looking again given the proximity of the third general election in four and a half years.
On the day of GE2017 the CON peer and pollster, Lord Ashcroft, sought to try to establish why people had voted the way they had and carried out a large sample survey.
A key question was asking those sampled what was the main factor in determining their votes. The outcomes for the main parties are featured in the chart above.
As can be seen 48% of Conservative voters named Brexit as the prime influencer whereas just 8% of Labour once said the same. That is a huge difference.
From this, I’d suggest, it is possible to deduce that Brexit is much less an issue amongst those who voted for Corbyn’s party than those who backed Theresa May’s. We don’t know whether we would get the same gap 30 months on but my guess is that this continues to be an issue that concerns the blue team much more than voters of the red one.
On top of that of the 8% LAB voters saying Brexit was the key factor then quite a lot were like me, tactical voters.
One thing that we have heard repeatedly since that election is that about two-thirds of Labour MPs represent constituencies that voted Leave in the referendum a year before. The significance of this is put into context by this polling.
If LAB voters, as it appears, are much less inclined to say that this is the issue that affected their vote then the challenges facing remain LAB MPs in seats which voted Leave are that much less.