If parliament defies the government and blocks a “hard” Brexit, a specific group of four million voters, identified by new research, deserves much of the credit – or the blame. These people voted to leave the European Union in 2016 but did not vote in this year’s general election. Had they turned out and voted in the same way as other pro-Brexit voters, the Conservatives would have won around 30 extra seats and a comfortable majority in the House of Commons.
The fact that one in four Brexit supporters stayed at home this June emerges from the largest ever panel study of its kind. YouGov tracked the voting decisions of the same 50,000 people at the time of the 2015 and 2017 general elections, as well as last year’s referendum. As a result, YouGov has been able to monitor voters changing their minds. The exceptional size of the sample allows us to examine the voting behaviour of different groups in granular detail. The New Statesman has been given exclusive access to the data, which provides an unrivalled insight into the factors that have led to today’s crisis over the future of the United Kingdom.
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