AT THE last election in 2019 Labour slumped to its fourth defeat in a row, and its worst result in almost a century. As the Tories eyed another decade in power, Labour stared into the abyss. One senior MP concluded that the party had “no right to exist”. Now Conservatives are the ones asking existential questions. The electoral coalition that was forged by Boris Johnson to “get Brexit done” has crumbled. Only half of those who backed the Tories last time say they will do so at the next election, which is set to take place this year.

Instead, Labour is on the brink of entering office. Its poll lead—of around 20 percentage points, according to our tracker—has hardly budged in a year. That puts the party roughly as far ahead as it was in the run-up to the 1997 election, when it last won power (and a thumping majority), under Sir Tony Blair. The polls could tighten. Voters do not especially love Labour or its leader, Sir Keir Starmer. But the electoral coalition the party is assembling could be even broader than the one squandered by the Tories, fusing an urban core with working-class voters in the north and suburban voters in the south.

To see what is happening beneath the headline polling numbers, The Economist has created a model of individual voting behaviour, based on the views of nearly 100,000 Britons. Using data from WeThink, a polling firm that conducts a weekly survey of voting intentions, our model calculates the probability that a voter will pick a political party based on eight characteristics, from their age and sex to their educational level and the population density of the place they live. (You can explore the model at economist.com/britain-voter.)

The model underscores how the tide is going out after 14 years of Conservative rule. All of the biggest population groups in our model have turned against the government (see chart). Only 4% of the 51m adults in Britain are more likely to vote Tory compared with 2019. They are from such unusual groups that you may struggle to find them (try older renters in the south-east, rural British Indians and young British Bangladeshi homeowners).

To see how Labour is benefiting from ebbing Tory fortunes, look at three archetypes who helped put Mr Johnson into office in 2019: a “red wall” voter in the north or Midlands who switched from Labour to the Conservatives for the first time, a “blue wall” Tory voter in southern England, and a Scot whose support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) meant fewer seats for Labour north of the border.

The classic “red wall” voter is a white man in the north-west aged between 55 and 64. Our estimates from the census suggest there are around 430,000 people who match this profile. In 2019 this kind of voter was more likely to vote Conservative than Labour. He is now twice as likely to back Labour, while also being tempted by Reform UK, an insurgent party critical of mass immigration. If this kind of swing materialises across the north of England, it is not impossible that the Tories could lose all 45 of their “red wall” seats.

Should that happen, the dominant narrative of the last election would be washed away. Lengthy tomes explored the sundered bond between Labour and the working classes in its former heartlands. The 2019 election seemed to reify a drift that had taken place over almost two decades. Even some Labour thinkers saw the break as irreversible.

A better explanation, suggests Christabel Cooper of Labour Together, a think-tank with close ties to Labour frontbenchers, was that a group of voters who should already have been swing voters (because they were close to the Tories on cultural issues like immigration) finally did swing. They left Labour when it ceased to offer them much—but they are now ready to abandon the Tories after promises to “level up” the country failed to materialise.

These voters fit a pattern seen across the Western world: low-income, less-educated, blue-collar workers who traditionally voted along class lines and are now up for grabs. Such “magic voters” are one reason why industrial policy is back in vogue, says Marcus Roberts of YouGov, a pollster.

Next, head to more traditional Tory territory and look at the voting intentions of a middle-aged, working woman with a mortgage in a suburban town in the south-east of England. There are about 160,000 people with a similar profile, according to our data. In 2019 this voter was almost twice as likely to back the Tories as Labour. Now she is almost twice as likely to vote Labour. Labour Together calls this type of voter “Stevenage woman”, after a town in Hertfordshire. She is not ideological, but she does want competence.

Seats like Stevenage will be the second big battleground at the next election. Support for the Conservatives has also fallen sharply in the south, though not quite as precipitously as in the north. Some pollsters assume that, faced with the stark choice of a ballot paper, many will return to the fold, as has often happened before. But people have become less tribal. “In focus groups I have rarely seen former Tory voters so angry,” says one pollster. Voters who were already unhappy about rising living costs and ropy public services became incensed by revelations of partying in Westminster during covid lockdowns and the debacle of Liz Truss’s premiership.

Sir Keir’s efforts to rebuild his party as a plausible government-in-waiting offer an alternative for these disenchanted Tories, but not the only one. The Liberal Democrats threaten to peel off more centrist Tory voters in the south-west and the south-east. They have also become competitive in London’s commuter belt—in seats like Chesham and Amersham, where they won a by-election in 2021—by stirring up concerns about sewage, sleaze and uncontrolled house building. Our model finds that the archetypal ”Amersham man” flirting with the Liberal Democrats is over 65, semi-retired and lives in a village.

Immigration is a big concern for some former Tory supporters. At the last election the Brexit Party decided not to run in seats the Conservatives were defending. This time around there is no such non-aggression pact with Reform UK, its insurgent successor; one Reform figure says the party hopes to inflict a “punishment beating” on the Tories. The first taste of pain came on February 15th, when Reform took 13% of the vote in a by-election in Wellingborough. The probability that old white men in towns and rural areas of the east of England will vote for Reform has risen by 20 percentage points compared with their support for the Brexit Party in 2019.

Finally, look to Scotland. It was once a Labour stronghold, but the party’s vote share there has fallen by more than half since 1997. In 2015 Scotland returned just one Labour MP; it now has two. But the latest polling data puts Labour level with the SNP. It now hopes to win almost half of Scottish seats, which would greatly ease its path to a majority.

Our model shows that the hardest swing in Scotland from the snp and towards Labour is among less-educated people in cities. Labour is also doing very well among middle-aged Scots. Since 2019 the chance of a 35- to 44-year-old Scot voting for Labour has increased by more than half. Many Scottish voters have grown tired of maladministration under the SNP. The nationalists have also been hurt by a financing scandal that ensnared their former leader, Nicola Sturgeon.

If voters in these big battlegrounds and beyond vote as they currently intend, the 2024 election will produce one of the largest swings ever, perhaps even beating Labour’s greatest victories in 1945 (11.8%) and 1997 (10.5%). Such a tidal shift, just five years after the Conservatives won the highest vote share of any party in four decades, can be explained partly by Tory missteps and Labour rebuilding. But two longer-term factors are also at work.

Swing high

Increased volatility is the first. In the 1960s around an eighth of British voters switched their choice between elections. By the 1980s it was a fifth. At the last election Professor Edward Fieldhouse, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues concluded that most of the electorate were swing voters. Politicians see it on the doorstep. “In 1997 around 40% of voters were up for grabs but today it is probably around 70%,” says Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s shadow business secretary and an MP in the north-west.

This shift has been driven by falling partisanship and the rise of smaller parties. But it was accelerated by Brexit, which severed already-fraying party loyalties. As a result voters are more likely to deliver shocks in response to catalysing events like, say, a calamitous budget that triggers a run on sterling. That should be balm to anyone who worries about the blind factionalism of tribal politics. It also means that the handy mental model many employ for thinking about British elections, of slow but decisive swings of the pendulum, may now be out of date.

The second factor is the restructuring of British politics around age and education, says Professor Jane Green of the University of Oxford. This trend also has deep roots: the declining importance of class, the loss of industrial work and the expansion of higher education. But again Brexit marked a breakpoint. By uniting Leavers, the Tories became the party of the older and less-educated; Labour shrank to a core of voters in cities and university towns.

The pros and cons of Brexit itself, which dominated the past two elections, will barely feature in this campaign. How people voted in the 2016 referendum still helps to predict their votes, but the allegiances of Leavers and Remainers have become more fluid (see chart).

Yet Brexit’s demographic fingerprints remain. Although Labour has begun to win back support from people without degrees, education still has a strong link with voting choice, says Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Labour is dominant among the 5m graduates aged under 35, according to our model. This large cohort lives mostly in cities. But as they get older and move out, they will become a growing problem for the Tories. By 2031, Professor Ford calculates, there will be 249 seats across the country where graduates significantly outnumber school-leavers, compared with just 26 seats in 2011.

Age has become the starkest electoral dividing line. In 1997 27% of 18-to 24-year-olds backed the Tories; our data puts the figure today at 8%. Yet among the over-65s Labour is polling more than ten percentage points below where it was in 1997. At the next election our model suggests the median Tory voter will be seven years older compared with 1997. The median Labour voter will have got more than two years younger, despite the country having aged.

This skew means Sir Keir’s coalition would be the youngest ever to elect a government. Labour will “win among the young to an extent never seen before”, says Joe Twyman of Deltapoll, another pollster. At the same time Conservative support among those of working age has collapsed. At the last election, the crossover age where voters were more likely to vote Tory than Labour was 45. At the next one it will be 68, according to our data.

This single fact helps to explain the depth of Tory worries. A party that represents only the elderly may not itself live long. The age skew between the parties makes Britain an increasingly extreme outlier. Elsewhere in the west young people have not abandoned conservatism: in Canada and America, conservative parties still win around 40% of young voters. If they cannot appeal more to the young the Tories risk becoming the British version of 50PLUS, a Dutch Eurosceptic party that advocates for pensioners’ interests.

Nothing has turned younger Britons off the Tories more than housing. Only around a third of Britons own their home at the age of 30, compared with more than half of earlier generations at that same age. Successive Tory governments have been unable to overcome the NIMBYism of their current voters, and as a result have alienated their future ones. “It is almost as if the Tories have a death wish,” wrote James Forsyth, a journalist who is now political secretary to Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, in 2022.

Housing will also weigh on voters’ minds in the run-up to the election because many mortgage-holders have been whacked with nasty interest-rate increases. For each month that the election is delayed, an average of 133,000 households will face an average increase of £288 ($365) in their monthly payments. Many blame the Tories, and Ms Truss’s cameo in particular. In the south-east the swing from Conservative to Labour has been stronger among mortgage-holders than any other type of property tenure.

Labour gains, Labour pains

Labour is not certain of victory. Sir Keir will face more intense scrutiny as the campaign approaches. His response to the Israel-Gaza conflict has upset many of his MPs and some of his younger voters. More than a quarter of the Muslim voters who backed Labour in 2019 say they won’t do so next time, according to Survation, a pollster. Our model suggests that, since the war in Gaza began, support for Labour among British Bangladeshis has slumped.

But the party’s path to power is much clearer than the Tories’. The personal ratings of Mr Sunak are dire. The cost of living remains the main topic in many focus groups; the Tories trail Labour by around ten percentage points on economic competence (even in 1997 they were ahead on this front). Mr Sunak has failed to meet his target to cut National Health Service waiting lists by half. Fights over an ill-advised policy to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda have done more to stir internecine rivalry than discomfort Labour.

Assuming Labour does win, its new coalition will change British politics. Although the Labour electorate would include suburban voters who are less gung-ho about new development, the voters who are most opposed to house building tend to be older, wealthier people in the south-east. Their party is unlikely to be the one in charge. If Labour returns to dominance in Wales and competes again in Scotland, strains on the union should ease, at least temporarily. Labour will be more relaxed about establishing a pragmatic relationship with the European Union.

None of that means this new coalition would be easy to hold together, however. Labour would inherit public finances and public services that are in a much worse state than in 1997. Steering between social conservatives and young progressives would not be straightforward. There would be fertile ground for a challenge from the left. The Tories are set to lose a big majority in a single term. It could happen again. ■