A national swing is flowing through the electorate like an incoming tide. Under Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leads the Conservatives by 46% to 26%, according to a YouGov poll published on March 31st
Your pith-helmeted correspondent has uncovered another, who embodies the forces again reshaping the British electorate. Our specimen is male, but could just as easily be female. He is aged between 18 and 80. He may have a white-collar job, or a blue-collar one. He voted either Leave or Remain in the Brexit referendum. He lives somewhere—pretty much anywhere—in Britain. He is leaning towards Labour. He is National Swing Man.
Politicos identified ever more tribes as online surveys became cheap and abundant. Archetypes helped them decode an electorate that had become more complex and volatile than Butler’s swingometer could capture. The Brexit referendum broke and remade party allegiances. Insurgent parties entered the field. Age and education replaced class as the best predictor of voting behaviour.
National Swing Man does not think much about Brexit these days. Research by Jane Green, Geoffrey Evans and Dan Snow, who work on the British Election Study, which Butler initiated in 1964 at Nuffield College, Oxford, shows how the grand Brexit realignment has ossified. Between 2016 and 2019, the proportion of Tory support drawn from Brexiteers went from half to three-quarters, as Leavers were drawn to the party and some old Tory Remainers embraced Euroscepticism.
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