Reform and young people in the context of votes at 16

Anecdotes may claim rising support for the right among the British youth, but is that so?

This week’s announcement of Government plans to lower the legal voting age for UK general elections to 16 has caused quite a stir. The proposals have been met with a wide range of responses, views, and takes. One which particularly caught my eye was the suggestion that rather than mostly helping Labour and Starmer stay in power at the next election, lowering the voting age would make happiest news for Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

I saw this sentiment expressed across multiple platforms and by multiple analysts and commentators, though a few of them have since added further clarification or rowed back slightly on it.

Nonetheless, it sparked a curiosity which I wanted to explore more deeply today than I had time to do on Twitter/X earlier in the week.

The argument leading folk to the above position goes as follows: Labour’s support among young voters is dropping through the floor, while the populist appeals of Farage and Reform are attracting ever increasing numbers of today’s teenagers and young adults – frustrated, angry, let down, and politically homeless – to their cause. Therefore, enfranchising a whole new band of young voters will benefit Farage to the greatest degree, and do little to help Labour.

But contrary to what might feel like a widespread belief about Reform, Labour, and the youth vote, the above is simply not what the opinion polling says.

For those of you wanting a quick read: my conclusion about lowering the voting age and what it might do for British political parties at the next general election is that there might be something in it for Reform, but there’s clearly a lot more in it for Labour.

What does the current polling about young voters say?

While it is easy enough to find young, suit-adorned men who are happy to go on television, podcasts, and radio to discuss their support for Farage and Reform’s positions and projects, the reality is that recent YouGov vote intention polling suggests only around 10% of young people (those aged 18-24) expected to vote if a general election were held tomorrow would opt for Reform UK.

That drops to only around 6%, or around 3-in-50 young people, if we look across all folk aged 18-24 (regardless of predicted turnout).

To put that into context, we would expect around 1/3 (~33%) of young voters to back Labour if an election were held tomorrow. Around a quarter (~25%), we think, would go Green. Around one-in-five (~20%) would likely vote for the Liberal Democrats.

And in fact, the number of voting 18–24-year-olds we would expect to back Reform is essentially equal to the number we would expect to vote Conservative (~8%).

But while Labour remain well ahead of Reform with younger voters, it is certainly true that their popularity among young people has been declining in recent years. We can assess this by looking at YouGov’s ‘How Britain Voted’ data from the past four elections, and comparing it to the current polling average.

Strikingly, we can see that Labour’s 1/3 figure now has essentially halved from the particularly high, Corbyn-driven figure of almost 2-in-3 in 2017. Their levels of support now are broadly similar to what they achieved among young voters under Ed Miliband in their 2015 defeat.

Support for Labour and Reform (and previous incarnations) among young voters, according to YouGov data. Note that figures for 2015 are of 18-29, while all others are of 18-24.

Meanwhile, Reform have essentially not budged among young voters since the 2024 election, but their 1-in-10 figure now is well above what the Brexit party achieved. It is also however no better than what UKIP achieved in 2015 – another data point against the suggestion that Reform UK are doing especially well with young folk at the moment.

What about those who can’t yet vote?

The above figures and the stories within them are of course all of current 18-24-year-old voters. People who could, if an election were held today, already vote (and those who were eligible to vote at the respective included elections in the table above).

But what can we say about how 16-to-17-year-olds might vote, and which party might benefit most from their inclusion if an election were held tomorrow?

Firstly, it is important to note that polling this group is extremely hard. Polling young adults (18-24) is hard enough, and polling teenagers is even harder. Not least because we don’t have politically representative targets for them – we obviously can’t use past voting behaviour for example to make sure we have the right balance of political preferences within this age group.

That caveat noted, we can appeal to some very timely polling of 16- to- 17-year-olds from Focaldata and Merlin Strategy which suggests that vote intention among that cohort looks broadly like those aged 18 to 24, though with higher Reform support.

In both polls, Labour clearly ahead with 16- to 17-year-olds. Starmer’s party register 35% of vote intention among this group with Focaldata, and 30% with Merlin.

Both then have Reform and the Greens tied for second place; Focaldata have Reform on 17% of vote intention and the Greens 19%, while Merlin Strategy have on 20% and 18% respectively.

So we have some evidence here that maybe Reform are stronger among those not yet in the electorate than those who are, but again the central message is that Labour, not Reform, are ahead with them.

And what about those who these proposed changes will actually bring into the electorate?

Of course, current 16- to 17-year-olds isn’t quite the right group to be thinking about here. Assuming the current government serve out their full term, then today’s 16- to 17-year-olds will be eligible to vote at the next election regardless of any proposed changes to the law.

The voters being enfranchised by government plans are in fact today’s 12- to 13-year-olds.

Now, while we know some things about the 16-17 age group, we know next to nothing about the current vote intention figures of today’s 12- to 13-year-olds.

Realistically, given the difficulty and severe limitations which would come any attempt to even begin to poll vote intentions among children, no actual, direct measurements of this group is likely to be forthcoming.

Doubtless only a fraction would even have thought for a split second about how they would vote in a hypothetical election for which they may or not be eligible.

But we can appeal to the established political science wisdom to guide as to what we can expect in four years’ time, given what we see in the data now.

Overall, the weight of evidence suggests that party vote choice in the UK tends to change most (at the aggregate level) as people age, rather than as generations or cohorts move in and out of the electorate. Up until the last election at least, people grow older, their probability of voting Conservative increases.

We can see this clearly from data collected and written up by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch in 2022 (as above), and from the YouGov/WPI pre-2024 election data below showing the fairly linear move into the ‘switch’ moment when someone became more likely to vote Conservative than Labour (it was 66, by the way). New voters pretty much always tend to start off on the left side of the political divide.

Interestingly, on a slight tangent, as we can see from John’s work that millennials were the first generation (since data has been available) in the UK and US to get more left-wing as they age (whereas other generations have become more right-wing).

Back to the main quest: Dr Laura Serra and Professor Maria Grasso outline to us in their forthcoming paper that each generation tends to be more socially liberal than the generation proceeding it (to some degree). Interestingly however, they note that levels of economic liberal/conservatism from generation to generation tends to be cyclical (rather than trending in specific directions).

Given this, and the fairly left-leaning location of the current cycle on economic attitudes (see above), we probably ought to expect voters coming into the electorate between now and the next election to be generally a least a little more left-leaning than the ones who came before them.

That said, previous evidence from YouGov suggests that a far higher degree of younger people today (Gen Z) are familiar with and actively agree with the views of the culturally extremely conservative Andrew Tate than any other generation.

Plus, if we think that 16- to 17-year-olds are more inclined to vote Reform UK than 18-24s, could we see a break in the academic consensus above? Will future voters be more right wing and lean more toward right-leaning parties than the voters who came of age before them?

It’s certainly possible, but even if might expect some reversal of this liberalising trend and increasing support for the political right as Gen Z come fully into the electorate, we should only expect the scale of any such changes (particularly when then mapped on to voting behaviour) to be minimal and gradual.

Writing last year for the Political Studies Association, Dr Serra showed how probability of voting Labour (over Conservative) among young people has followed what we would describe as an autocorrelated trend since 1964.

That is to say, aside from a structural break around the landslide 1997 general election (where probability of every voter backing Labour went up dramatically across the board) the probability of a voters under the age of 35 opting for Labour at election 0 (or, now) is very closely related to the probability of a voter under the age of 35 opting for Labour at election -1 (or, the one before).

Given that, we ought to expect current levels of support for right- and left-wing parties among today’s 18-24-year-olds and 16- to 17-year olds to be a pretty good proxy - or an anchor, or a watermark - of how that support will shape among young people in four years’ time.

How does this compare to the situation in other countries?

The sustained popularity of the political left over the right puts the UK in something of an odd position compared to many other Western democracies.

Polling and electoral evidence from places such as the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, among others suggests young people increasingly favouring right-wing (broadly defined) parties. In some instances, support for the right in these countries goes well and clearly beyond their backing for left-wing parties.

These comparative contexts, I think, drive a lot of the general (erroneous) conventional wisdom about Reform UK and young voters in Britain. We constantly see evidence of the political right doing increasingly well with young people in democracies across the globe – so, surely it must be the same here?

To that: yes, Reform UK are certainly far more popular among younger people than, for instance, the Brexit Party, before them, which gives the sense of growing momentum for the British political right among young voters. But, importantly, not momentum which has yet taken them past the benchmark set by UKIP in 2015.

And we are still talking about very few numbers of young people supporting right-wing parties in Britain right now. And, frankly, those numbers remain dwarfed by the support for left and centre-left parties among Britain’s youth.

So what’s the upsum?

Given the collective evidence above, I don’t expect a sudden huge change in the polling nor the long-term trends on young people, political ideology, and voting, within the next four years.

Or, at least, I don’t believe we should hold any expectation that it will change as our default position.

We should expect voters coming into the electorate as a result of Labour’s proposed changes to be more likely to vote Labour over Reform, and also for at least as many young voters at the next election to be backing the Greens as Nigel Farage’s party.

And, as such, votes at 16 will, the evidence above suggests, absolutely will benefit Labour (and the British political left in general) more so than Reform (and the British political right).