Election vote share data proves Tories made few gains but Labour lost significant ground to the pro-Remain alliance parties.
We’ve taken the liberty of collating vote share data from the last seven general elections and the results are jaw dropping! In fact, our report shows that it’s unlikely that Labour’s policies or Corbyn’s popularity had anything to do with the result.
Our data has revealed that the Tory vote share only increased fractionally between 2017 and 2019. In fact, they gained a mere 329,767 votes. Labour’s vote share did see a significant drop between the 2017 and 2019. However, what’s striking is that Labour’s 2019 vote share was still higher than the results for the 2005, 2010 and 2015 general elections/
Labour lost 2,608,842 votes in 2019 so the question is, if they didn’t lose ground to the Tories then where did it go? First of all, its worth noting that there was an overall drop in turn out of about 633,962 but what’s also clear is that the Remain Alliance parties all saw significant boosts to their vote shares…
LibDems gained: 1,324,562
SNP gained: 264,812
Green Party gained: 340,032
So, the combined gain in vote share for the Remain Alliance works out to 1,929,406, which is clearly more significant than the 329,767 gain for the Tories.
I know what you’re thinking.. could they have lost seats to the Brexit Party? It’s certainly likely that some Labour Leave voters will have been tempted to vote Tory or even support the Brexit Party but the data shows that this was a comparatively small number of people…
UKIP drop in vote share: 571,251
BNP drop in vote share: 4,132
Brexit Party gain in vote share: 642,323
Conservative gain in vote share: 329,767
The combined gain in vote share for the pro-Brexit parties comes to 972,090. However, given that the majority of UKIP voters rallied behind the pro-Brexit parties, the over all gain that could not easily be attributed to other pro-Brexit parties was just under 400,000.
The report also compares vote share data for the previous 6 elections (going back to 1997) and it’s striking to note that Labour’s vote share for 2017 (12,877,918) was significantly higher than the 2001 election result (the 2017 result showed an increased vote share of 2,137,270).
Clearly, this report demonstrates that there is no evidence to support claims that Labour’s left wing policies, or their ambitious manifesto, or the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, had any part to play in the GE2019 election result. If anything, it does demonstrate that the framing of this election as a ‘Brexit election’ played a much bigger part in the vote distribution than people are prepared to admit.
