💀🌳 Are the Tories Facing Extinction? 🦕💀 [Part 1 of 2] Good day to you Squids and Squabblers 🦑 In an effort to bring original content 🌈 to the Squabbling masses I thought it might be interesting to partake in some hard-hitting wild speculation. Unfortunately for you folks, I only know about two things: how to make a great cheese sandwich and UK politics. This post is about UK politics. Don't groan. In particular, it is about how demographics are impacting the Conservative (Tory) vote base. The party that has been in power in the UK since 2010. I think this topic is interesting as it reflects on trends we see happening both here and in other Western nations... but I'll put a tl;dr at the end for those who want to get to the point. Feel free to share this elsewhere. Maybe we can grow our... shoal? Now join me as we pull on this yarn ⬇️🧵 I will preface this post by saying I'm not going to just reel off the Tories' terrible polling numbers. Funny as that would be. This post also doesn't talk about Partygate or Liz Truss (not that there'd be much to say about her). These things just make all of the below that much worse for the Tories. And yes, as you can tell I am not a Conservative voter, but I'm trying to support all of my statements with data and sources so people can mark my work if they so please. This is actually marginally too big for one post, so I put it into two parts. Part 2 is here: https://squabbles.io/u/Kakuflux/post/AJoDzJ9wZM The Magic Number One thing that's going to become important later on is what I'm going to call the 📈 Tory Vote Share Benchmark 📈. It is simply the answer to this question: "What % of the vote do the Tories need to stand any chance of winning an election?" The answer is 36%. Trust me bro. You can go back 100 years, they have never won with less than this. They have lost with more than this vote share... lots of times. David Cameron got 36.1% in 2010 and that resulted in a hung parliament. Now, the pedants will come out and say because of the voting system technically it depends on the other parties, and that is true. But this is a rough guide, nothing more. To win with less than this number would require the most significant fracturing of the opposition parties we have ever seen. So 36% is the magic number for having a chance of winning elections. But what is the current size of the Tory voting base? Don't Mention Brexit To understand that question, we need to somehow answer: how much did Brexit fuckery impact the 2019 general election, in which the Tories ran out clear winners? How many voted for the Tories only because of Brexit but would now no longer vote for them? First, let me describe Brexit in 2023. Imagine you are on a night out in a nice pub with your mates (it serves tapas), then 52% of the group vote to leave the nice pub and go to a club down the road. Once you get to the club you realise how awful it is, the drinks are expensive, and everything smells faintly of urine. Despite this, 32% of the group still think it was a good idea and are having a great time but they can't explain why. Now it's the next day and the rest of us are nursing our hangover, wanting the memories to go away. During the Brexit saga, the Tory vote share went from around the 36-37% up to 42.3% in 2017 and 43.6% in 2019, an increase of about 6-7pp. This reflects non-traditional Tory voters supporting populist policy and moving across to "get Brexit done". The question is, now the dust has settled and Boris and Brexit are no more, will voters go back to voting how they did before? The truth is, I don't know this. It's one of the hardest parts of assessing the Tories natural "water level". Let's make a generous assumption that, as about 3 in 5 Brexiteers are happy with their choice, that 3 in 5 of these net new voters stick with the Tories next time round. This gives us an estimate for the size of the 'true' Conservative voter base in the 2019 general election of 40.9%. That feels fair as it also happens to be the average of the last three elections and a healthy 5% above their minimum benchmark. Though many would argue this is generous given current polling, this is not their 'current support' but rather the pool of people who have voted for them historically and would consider voting for them again. While this number is useful to know, it doesn't change the trends which we are going to describe next... Part 2: https://squabbles.io/u/Kakuflux/post/AJoDzJ9wZM Source for data in attached chart: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7529/