Politics

As anyone who has ever spent any time in university Conservative societies will tell you, it is sometimes tempting to believe that the only young people who vote Conservative are affected Churchill wannabes, with pocket watches, pipes, and perhaps a pince-nez.

Such a claim would be unfair – or at least it would have been in any election so far. But among young voters the Conservatives now face record low support. This is one of the reasons why in 2024, the Conservatives are facing bitter defeat. But it could mean that in 2029, the party could face wipeout.

A recent poll carried out at Whitestone Insight of 13,534 British adults revealed things look extremely dim for the Conservatives among younger voters. Of the 18-24s we surveyed, only 8% said they planned to vote for the Conservatives. Among 25–34-year-olds, it was a dismal 6%. 

To put this in context, in 2019, 19% of 18-24s who voted in that election voted for the Conservatives. And this was with Jeremy Corbyn, star of Glastonbury, offering free university tuition to all students. Even then the Conservatives clung on to almost one in five 18–24-year-olds. 

2019 itself represented a then record low showing for the Conservatives among this age group. From the heady heights of 35% support in the 1992 election, the Conservatives have never been a favourite of the young, but they have always secured a somewhat solid proportion of young people to put a cross in the box for their local Tory candidate. 

Even in 1997, at the crest of the New Labour wave, the Conservatives still managed to convince 27% of 18–24-year-olds, who voted in that election, to vote for them.

The question of how the Conservatives have got themselves into such a state among the young is evident from the policies they have prioritised over successive parliaments.

Firstly, Brexit was never going to be a vote winner among the young, and successive Governments’ chronic and well-documented inability to build any houses has left record numbers of young people with crippling rents, or still at home with their parents. Similarly, placing wealthy pensioners’ needs over and above the needs of students has not helped either — especially their seemingly undying attachment to the triple-lock.

For a while, the Conservative Party could largely ignore younger voters and live in blissful denial that doing so would ever come to bite them back. 

Now, the Conservatives’ very survival might be at risk  — not in 2024, but in 2029. This will be when their current voter base has, to put it crudely, died, and these younger voters, who currently do not intend to vote Conservative, will most likely still not be on the housing ladder, not have seen an above inflation pay rise, will be struggling to pay the bills, and possibly even be about to be conscripted into a war they do not want to fight in. 

To add to future Tory trouble, there is a good chance that Labour, whether it has a majority or relies on SNP or Liberal Democrat MPs, will extend voting rights to 16-year-olds. Conservatives will find that the mountain to climb in 2029 will only become steeper. 

Labour could go one step further and allow EU nationals living in the UK to vote in general elections as well. Conservatives in that situation could face oblivion. 

More than that, it would be difficult for any party of the right to gain traction in that scenario. It would face a triple-pronged challenge: reduced support from current 18-35-year-olds, extra votes for 16- and 17-year-olds, and EU nationals voting in domestic elections. 

The years between the 2024 and 2029 elections must be the time in which conservatives of all stripes finally take this generational threat extremely seriously. Obviously, there are many unknowns in the five years of exile which almost certainly lie ahead. Labour might undo themselves and there is every possibility that for 18–35-year-olds Keir Starmer loses his appeal, for some reason we cannot yet see.

But that does not mean the Conservatives can be complacent – they must be the opposite. A thorough analysis of what has been so effective at turning off young voters over the last 14 years would be a good place to start. In the end, it comes down to the fundamentals: competency and the economy.  

On both of these measures, the Conservatives have failed to deliver for young people. As a party, five years in opposition must be used wisely — avoiding lurching to the left or to the right, instead considering how best to champion conservatism for a new generation. If the party fails to get it right, there may be no coming back.

Lachlan Rurlander undertook work experience with Bright Blue in 2020, and tweets @rurlander.

Views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

A whole six months away from the upcoming Republican National Convention, things could not be clearer: Donald Trump is – at least de-facto – the party’s presumptive nominee. In a way, this is a reality which seems to defy all logic.
Back in 2020, Trump lost the presidential election to a Democratic candidate who notoriously spent much of the campaign period giving interviews to friendly media over Zoom from the comfort of his basement. With the GOP – that being, the Republican Party – having already lost the House of Representatives in 2018, Trump went on to make things a whole lot worse for his party by undermining his voters’ faith in the electoral process in Georgia, leading to the Democrats gaining control of the Senate. One would think that, at that point, GOP voters would have thought to themselves that it was about time to say, “thank you”, to President Trump and go in search of fresh leadership. Instead, during the 2022 “mid-term” elections, they overwhelmingly backed populist, Trump-endorsed candidates across numerous purple states – most of whom went on to lose, with the GOP on the whole underperforming expectations in a spectacular fashion.

Despite this electoral record, the Republican Party remains largely committed to Trump. He has won the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary so far with absolute majorities. It now seems clear to everyone – aside from, evidently, Nikki Haley – that he will go on to face Joe Biden in the general election in November. So, how has “the Donald” become so dominant in the GOP?

Arguably, Trump is a new kind of phenomenon within the GOP, often described as a populist without a coherent ideology. This is not entirely accurate. If one considers what Trump represents to people – and one need not think that Trump himself is fully conscious of this – one thinks of economic nationalism, nativism, isolationism and a general opposition to a perceived “liberal blob” at the heart of the American political mainstream and the American bureaucracy. This set of attitudes is not at all new, and it has existed within the Republican Party for decades, represented most notably by Pat Buchanan, who challenged President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries on the basis of the latter’s interventionist foreign policy and perceived lack of a meaningful social conservatism. Trump, whether he knows it or not, reinvigorated and became a standard-bearer for this strand of American conservatism in 2016. The key question here is not so much, “why Trump?” as, “why now?”

The answer to this question lies largely around white working-class voters; that is the constituency to which Pat Buchanan sought to appeal in the nineties. Back then, however, his paleoconservatism simply did not take off. So what changed?

Well, first and foremost, the Democratic Party – traditionally the post-war bastion of working-class voters – changed in a number of significant ways. Previously the champion of protectionism and industrial policy against the free-trade and laissez-faire attitudes of the GOP, Bill Clinton’s so-called Third Way orientation paved the way for a general consensus against tariffs and protections for industry in American politics. Whatever one thinks of the overall merits of the policies favoured by this consensus, it is impossible to dispute that they altered the way of life for many white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest. Many people lost their jobs as a result of factories relocating to Mexico and ended up relying on welfare payments, often resorting to drugs and alcohol to deal with the despair which comes with such profound changes.

Alongside the Democrats’ embrace of free trade, the party gradually started to become more and more socially liberal. Within less than two decades, the party became a lot more progressive on issues such as gender identity, abortion and immigration. The combination of laissez-faire economics with a far more radical social liberalism produced a Democratic party which was decidedly at odds with the views generally held by white working-class voters – who are not dissimilar from our own so-called Red Wallers, being generally in favour of economic interventionism but also socially conservative and patriotic.

All this being the case, when Trump came into American politics as a sort of 21st-century Pat Buchanan, the constituency which the latter had worked so hard to win over was far more ready to embrace someone like him. As such, these voters swarmed to Trump’s cause, finding in him a way of expressing their intense frustration with the post-Reagan consensus. As a result, some of the more traditional Republican voters – especially suburban women – did end up switching over to the Democrats, but many stayed, largely due to the much-discussed phenomenon of negative polarisation.

Evidently, over the past few decades both Republicans and Democrats have undergone serious transformations, paving the way for a new era of Trumpism. As such, if the Democrats continue to move in a drastically radical and socially left-wing direction – with a fixation on the “hot button” issues of race and gender – they have little hope of regaining the working-class vote, in effect ensuring the continued dominance of Trump within the Republican Party.

Max Minkin is a Law student at BPP and Durham University Philosophy and Politics Graduate