There is a particularly ineradicable meme that the reason why the election date matters is because it will change whether the election falls in term time, when students – who are, the argument runs, so important to the electoral prospects of Labour and the Liberal Democrats – will be on holiday.
There are a couple of problems with this argument. The first is that it relies on a big misread of who the voters are in university seats: the voters who decide the outcome are people employed by the university and its surrounding industries, academics and other graduates who tend to have liberal-left values. These people do not all leave at the end of term. Most students (around 70 per cent according to YouGov) vote in their home constituencies in any case. Students, particularly undergraduate students, don’t matter all that much electorally speaking, even in university seats. They matter most as committed activists, particularly for Labour but all parties, even the Conservatives, rely heavily on the volunteer work done by students.
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