From class and education to your health and where you live, people in different groups fall into different categories in terms of how they tend to vote. A Labour victory in 2024 would be built on different foundations than Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.
By Prof Will Jennings, Sky News elections analyst, and Dr Jamie Furlong, University of Westminster
Tuesday 2 July 2024
In December 2019, Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a historic victory that redrew the map of British politics – winning seats in the north of England and midlands that had been held by Labour for generations.
If the polls are to be believed, Keir Starmer's Labour is on the cusp of inflicting a heavy defeat on Rishi Sunak's Conservatives.
Labour looks likely to regain many seats lost in post-industrial parts of northern England and reach deep into middle-class Conservative heartlands - in some ways resembling the landslide won by Tony Blair.
While many of the seats won in 1997 might fall into Labour's hands once again, the underlying geography of support may look a little different.
Through analysis of general elections between 1979 and 2019, we can identify the sorts of places that have tended to vote for the Labour and Conservative parties.
We can also use predictions from YouGov's recent MRP (Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification) poll for Sky News to understand how the result might look on 4 July.
The continued decline of class voting
Let's first look at the changing relationship between the number of people employed in working class jobs in a constituency and voting for Labour and the Conservatives.
Back in 1979, the higher the proportion of people in manual and semi-skilled jobs in a constituency, the bigger Labour's vote and the lower the Conservative vote.
In 1997 this was still true, though the relationship was weaker. By 2019, manufacturing had become positively associated with Conservative support - with the party tending to secure a higher vote in areas with larger workforces in blue collar occupations.
While the MRP predictions suggest there may be a slight reversal of this trend in the 2024 election, it is unlikely to return to the clear pattern of class voting observed in 1997.
The realignment of the educational divide
In 1979 and to some extent in 1997, Labour's vote was higher in areas with fewer university graduates. Places with more degree holders, in contrast, tended to vote more heavily for the Conservatives - as the party of the professional middle classes.
Over this 40-year period there has been a steady reversal of the pattern of voting associated with education. As such, Labour has gradually become stronger in areas with more people who have been to university, while the Conservatives have tended to do worse.
Now the difference between the parties is not statistically significant.
Labour's support is robust in economically left behind areas
According to selected other measures, the geography of Labour's vote has changed little over four decades.
The level of socio-economic deprivation - measured here with the number of people reporting being in poor health - in a constituency is persistently a strong positive predictor of Labour support.
The projected result for 2024 does not point to a significant reversal of this pattern, though it does seem that the link between the relationship is perhaps weakening slightly.
Compared to those seats won by Tony Blair in 1997, the distribution of Labour's vote on 4 July is likely to be higher in places with more graduates and lower in areas with a more working-class electorate. But the party is likely to do similarly as well in areas of high socio-economic deprivation.
New heartlands?
What might the electoral map look like after the dust settles on the morning of 5 July?
One way of comparing the geography of support for each party in 1997 and 2024 is to look at the clusters of constituencies where the parties do better or worse than we might expect - based on their socioeconomic characteristics.
We focus here on England and Wales as the rise of the SNP has created a very different electoral map in Scotland.
In the maps, constituencies are shaded red where Labour do better than expected, and shaded [dark] blue where the party's vote is below expectations.
The map for 1997 shows that in that election Labour did better, relative to expectations, in many of the coalfields of South Yorkshire - typically former industrial towns and villages with older, white, predominantly working-class populations.
By 2024, this cluster of constituencies where Labour does better than expected had disappeared.
Instead, Labour's over-performance has extended further across Merseyside into parts of Cheshire and Derbyshire, and most significantly across large swathes of the rural far north of England.
Many of these constituencies are relatively well-to-do compared to former coal-mining areas.
This is also consistent with suggestions that there could be unlikely gains for Labour in 2024 in places such as Hexham in Northumberland or Tatton in Cheshire.
What does this mean for the future?
If Labour are able to win back large swathes of the seats in the North and the Midlands on Thursday, there will likely be much debate over whether the party has rebuilt the so-called Red Wall.
On the surface, regaining seats in places like Bishop Auckland, Stoke-on-Trent, Grimsby, Bolsover, and the Rother Valley will certainly re-establish the party as a dominant force across the entire region.
However, the Red Wall itself may have a very different profile to that held by the party in 1997.
Back then, some of Labour's biggest majorities were found in former coal-mining and industrial towns. Tony Blair himself held a 53-point vote majority in Sedgefield. In 2024, these are likely to be narrower gains with more substantial majorities won by Labour in the bigger cities of the North of England.
At the same time, the party's support will likely be consolidated in areas with high numbers of younger graduates and professionals - the sorts of demographic that traditionally (back in 1979) voted Conservative.
The redrawing of the electoral map of England and Wales is far from finished.
"The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales" by Jamie Furlong and Will Jennings is published by Oxford University Press.
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