Lessons from polls of the 1987 general election

It’s time for a trip to the archives this week with a look at some of the polling from the 1987 general election, and what we can learn from it.

Before we get to that… being a wise reader of this newsletter, you will of course look down on Twitter polls with the disdain they deserve. But for a bit of fun, here’s a Twitter poll on when the next general election will be.

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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Younger voters and the 1987 general election

From the “Election ‘87” one-off magazine.

The Conservative Party’s low poll ratings among younger voters was the subject of a recent edition of the Red Box podcast, during which Seb Payne made the eye-catching point that the Conservatives outpolled Labour at the 1987 general election among younger voters.

I always find the 1987 election interesting. So this prompted me to reach for my books and first check, did the Conservatives really out-poll Labour among younger voters in 1987? The data on that is mixed. I found two age breakdowns for support at the 1987 general election (an exit poll and the British Election Survey). One had Labour just ahead and one the Conservatives just ahead, with varying definitions of where in the 20s ‘young’ stops.

Stepping away from the details and looking at the bigger picture, it’s certainly true that the Conservatives used to be far better at winning the support of younger voters than they are at the moment or have been for some time.

The implication of the podcast discussion was that polling poorly with younger voters is bad news for a party’s future. Conversely, talking up how well you did among younger voters, and the hope that gives for the future, is the staple of many a defeated candidate’s election night speech.

But what happened after 1987?

Polling well with young voters didn’t presage an era of Conservative dominance. The party had to dump its leader even to hang on with a small majority in 1992, and was then swept out in a landslide defeat, got hammered again and then lost a third time. Though it finally got back into power the time after that, it was without securing an overall majority. Hardly a picture of doing well with young voters setting up a period of success.

Or look at Labour. In 1992 Labour was just behind the Conservatives among younger voters on both those sources. Yet despite that weakness with younger voters, it was just about to have the most successful run of general election wins in its history.

So while there are many reasons to worry about how well a party is doing with younger people, the possible outcome of future general elections is not closely related.

What should really worry the Conservatives more at the moment isn’t that they are doing worse with younger voters than they did in 1987. But it’s that Millennials aren’t getting more right wing as they get older.

More on that last point in my earlier edition, Do long-term trends mean doom for the Conservatives?

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

The last poll to have a single digit Labour lead was in September 2022 and the last Conservative lead was in December 2021.

The consistent size of Labour’s leads as a party of opposition is only matched by that for New Labour in the bulk of the 1992-97 Parliament.

Labour’s leads are significantly larger than Harold Wilson’s in the run-up to the 1964 general election, at which he ended 13 years of Conservative government.

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here.

Last week’s edition

The misleading mystique of "internal polling".

Know other people interested in political polling?

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