Thread by @uk_domain_names

A lot is said about how young people "don't vote", but the reality is much more nuanced - and more interesting! In fact, the youngest voters are a super-important source of Remain votes. Take a look at the table below, then I'll go through it...

As you can see, the youngest voters are the least likely group to vote. In the 2017 GE, only 57% of registered voters between 18-24 voted.

However, they are very, very Remain-focused. So even with that smaller turnout they contribute enormously to Remain's cause.

That's what I have teased out in the last column. Using the 2017 Ge turnout figures as a guide, and expressed Remain/Leave voting intentions by age from last year, you can see that 100 registered voters between 18-24 would mean 44 votes for Remain and just 10 votes for Leave.

(That's rounded up/down.) In other words, a net gain for Remain of 34 votes!

I'll say it again so that it sinks in: every 100 young people voting advances the Remain vote by 34 more than the Leave vote!

Amazing, right? I was pretty surprised.

What it shows us is that while a good turnout is of course important, it's the Remain/Leave tendency of younger voters that could really tip the balance. Even if they are less likely to go and vote than retirees, for example, they're so Remain-oriented it's *still* more valuable.

Now, since the 2016 referendum (more accurately since 1 July 2016) new voter registrations have broken down as follows:
Under 25: 6,463,480
25-34: 1,216,134
35-44: 684,097
45-54: 445,490
55-64: 304,662
65-74: 172,302
75+: 100,758
gov.uk/performance/re…

So what happens when you feed all those millions of new voter registrations into the tendency to vote Leave/Remain mapping we've already established? Something amazing!

Yes, that's right. Without anything else changing (i.e. excluding demographic effect of older voters dying which would tilt the table further to Remain) there are nearly 2.4 million more potential extra Remain votes now than there are extra Leave votes. Linger on that a moment.

And if you put those extra Remain and Leave votes into the 2016 referendum result, you get 51.4% Remain and 48.6% Leave.

In other words, the new voter registrations explain a lot of the shift to Remain we have seen in polls since the referendum.

But here's something else. We're not at the end of the election campaign yet. New voters are signing up every day. I took the new voter registrations for the week since the GE was announced, and applied a pessimism factor (/10 rather than /7) to get this...

Yes, we can expect almost 550,000 additional Remain-leaning voters to vote in the election based on new voter registrations between now and the 26 November registration deadline, vs just 311,000 additional Leave-leaning voters. It's not huge, but it's not nothing either!

That's 238,000 more Remain-leaning votes that will be "activated" over the 3 weeks until voting registration closes. Assuming we all do our bit to help persuade people - especially younger people - to register to vote!
gov.uk/register-to-vo…

It's like a giant funnel: throw enough registered voters in the top and you get a decent amount of *actual* Remain votes back out. And you get more Remain than Leave votes back out for all cohorts up to and including the 35-44 age group.

Added: someone asked about "pessimism factor". I summed 7 days of data, but instead of using 1/7th as the daily average for the remainder of the time until voter registration closes, I used 1/10th. Why? Because the low hanging fruit may be gone i.e. stampede to register ended.