The Data Review: European Elections

(If you’re viewing this post on a mobile browser, you will have to click through on the static images to use the interactive features.)

Chris Hanretty produced a breakdown of the EU Elections by constituency.  It is worth stressing that these results do not on their own tell us anything about a future general election result. EU election votes, for various reason, don’t correspond to GE outcomes. Additionally, Northern Ireland is not included in this electoral projection.

As you’d expect, Britain is splitting on Leave/Remain cultural values beyond traditional party loyalties. Remain majority areas showed large gains for the Liberal Democrats and Leave majority areas saw large gains for the Brexit Party.

Labour’s vote collapsed across the country, but where it held up matters for the future of the party. Constituencies with a higher proportion of BAME voters saw a less sharp fall in the Labour vote.

Labour’s route to unite it’s coalition of voters over Brexit is unclear, it shedded voters to both Leave and Remain parties in important seats. If we map Euro Election 2019 results onto General Election constituencies (bearing in mind all the heavy caveats listed above), Labour’s only gain would be the marginal Harrow East.

The Green Party has gained a better position in Brighton, Sheffield, Bristol and Norwich, traditionally areas with a strong Labour showing. Areas with a higher proportion of graduate voters swung more to the Green Party.

Labour has fallen back even further in Scotland, but this time not to the SNP. Labour saw it’s voters moving to the Liberal Democrats, and more voters than expected moved to the Brexit Party too.

 

Further Disclaimer from Chris: ‘There will be updates to incorporate known constituency results in Edinburgh, and that generally some of the estimates for Wales and Scotland look off in the bigger city areas.’

Sources:
Constituency Breakdown: https://medium.com/@chrishanretty/ep2019-results-mapped-onto-westminster-constituencies-8a2a6ed14146
UK Election Results:
https://data.gov.uk/dataset/b77fcedb-4792-4de4-935f-4f344ed4c2c6/general-election-results-2017
EU Ref Results:
https://medium.com/@chrishanretty/final-estimates-of-the-leave-vote-or-areal-interpolation-and-the-uks-referendum-on-eu-membership-5490b6cab878