We now know how the country voted as a whole in Thursday’s referendum, but how were demographic factors like age, income, and education reflected in the result?
An eve-of-result poll released by YouGov at 10pm last night (which, admittedly, gave Remain a four-point lead) confirms the age/voting intention correlation shown by polls throughout the campaign:
EU referendum by age group — 75% of voters aged 24 and under voted against Brexit https://t.co/eQci0vNffx pic.twitter.com/UADq1NaL8v
— POLITICO Europe (@POLITICOEurope) June 24, 2016
The Guardian has some indicators of other demographic trends, formed by plotting each voting area by how it voted against various socioeconomic factors.
According to these results, areas where more residents had higher education skewed sharply to Remain, while areas where a more had no formal qualifications were slightly more likely to vote Leave.
The median income of an area also showed a loose correlation with results – and areas where the median rose above 30k all chose to Remain, and the lowest income areas voted to Leave:
Graphics: The Guardian
A higher median age meant an area was slightly more likely to vote for Remain, though the correlation is surprisingly weak given YouGov’s age findings. Finally, almost every area where more than 30 per cent of residents were not born in the UK voted to Remain.
What was voter turnout across age groups?
Update: 26/6: Social media is passing round a stat that only 36 per cent of 18-24 year olds voted. Given that this age group was the most likely to vote Remain, this would imply that if turnout had matched that of higher age groups, Remain coudld have triumphed.
However, it’s not quite as simple as that – this is not real turnout data, and we will in fact never know exactly what proportion of each age group voted. Some quick background: at General Elections, representatives from political parties stand outside polling stations asking for your voting ID number, and collate this information country-wide to figure out who voted (and guess how, based on canvassing data). However, they tend not to at one-off votes, such as referendums, and didn’t on Thursday.
The source for the referendum’s supposed turnout data is Sky Data, which tweeted this out today:
% who got through our final #EUref poll turnout filter by age group:
18-24: 36%
25-34: 58%
35-44: 72%
45-54: 75%
55-64: 81%
65+: 83%— Sky Data (@SkyData) June 25, 2016
Sky isn’t claiming this is collected data – it’s projected, and a subsequent tweet said it was based on “9+/10 certainty to vote, usually/always votes, voted/ineligible at GE2015”. I’ve asked for more information on what this means, but for now it’s enough to say it’s nothing more than a guess. Others have tried to extrapolate turnout data from an Ashcroft poll, but again, approach with caution: the poll wasn’t designed to measure age turnout, so won’t have been weighted accordingly.
Graphics from the BBC and FT show that areas with younger populations generally had lower turnout, but that’s the closest we have to hard-and-fast data on youth turnout.
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