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We'll know the results of the European elections by tomorrow afternoon (with much of them coming in overnight) but it's interesting that one trend that would explain the vote being down in Leave areas and up in Remain areas is a drop in Leave turnout & increase in Remain turnout.
All sorts of pairs of figures could give a crude approximation of the early turnout figures we've seen, for example:
Leave turnout -6%, Remain turnout +9%
Leave turnout -6%, Remain turnout +9%
Or (another example): Leave turnout -8%, Remain turnout +11%
However, if voters behaved broadly uniformly across the country (admittedly *not* a given) it's mathematically impossible for any scenario in which the Leave turnout increased while the Remain turnout decreased to produce the sorts of turnout swings we're seeing.
Why? Because if the swings were uniform, then the increase in the Leave vote in Leave areas would mean their overall turnout should have increased (it seems to have dropped) and that in Remain areas should have decreased (it seems to have increased).
All of the above falls apart completely if Remain and Leave voter behaviour was totally different in different parts of the UK. Which is of course still possible. Nevertheless, I feel happier going into the results this evening having done some modelling.
Here's a table showing the actual turnout for 147 councils (not all have reported turnouts yet). You can see that the trend is for Leave area turnout to drop (with a few exceptions) and Remain area turnout to increase (again, with a few exceptions)...
