The strongly pro-European parties won 40%, while the Brexit Party plus Ukip together won 35% of the votes in the elections to the European Parliament.
What, though, should we do about the rump of Conservative and Labour voters? The easiest assumption is to count most Labour voters as pro-European, and most Tories as pro-Brexit.
However, data buried in Survation’s eve-of-election poll for the Daily Mail casts doubt on one of these two assumptions. To be sure, it confirms that the 14% who voted Labour divided 3-1 for staying in the EU. The more intriguing finding is that the 9% of voters who stayed loyal to the Tories divided exactly evenly.
Here are the figures.
The table shows what happened last week. People who would vote Conservative in a general election divide two-to-one in favour of Brexit. That’s a clear majority – though we should note that opinion among Tories is more balanced than that among Labour and Liberal Democrats.
Huge numbers of normally Tory pro-Brexit voters switched to the Brexit party; but far fewer Tory who voted Remain were attracted to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Hence the numerically small, but proportionally large, number of Tory pro-Europeans who did not defect.
It’s worth noting that the Remain/Leave balance is much the same for the 33% of voters who would back Labour in a general election as the 14% who voted Labour last week. Other polling data suggests that those Labour leavers who defected did so some weeks ago; the sharp drop in Labour support during the final fortnight of the recent campaign was almost wholly the consequence of Labour pro-Europeans switching to the Lib Dems and Greens. In any event, many more Labour pro-Europeans than Brexiters defected overall.
On these figures, then – as percentages of all voters last week – Labour’s 14% split 10.5% Remain, 3.5% Leave. Meanwhile the Tories’ 9% divided 4.5% for each side. Taken together, the 23% of Tory plus Labour voters divided 15% Remain, 8% Leave. Add these to the votes of the strongly pro-and anti-Brexit parties, and we end up with 55% Remain, 43% Leave.
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