Did only retired people vote in a majority for the Conservatives in the UK 2017 General Election?

Question

I was looking through the wikipedia article for the 2017 general election in the UK, and found these numbers provided by a YouGov poll that broke down the voting results by demographic.

Most of the results were fairly unsurprising (older people and homeowners tend to support Conservatives etc.) but I found this demographic breakdown very surprising.

It shows that, except for retired people, every demographic based on work status voted in a higher percentage for Labour than for the Conservatives.

As it only provides percentages and not numbers, it's hard to get a sense of how large the turnout of each of these demographics was, but it's still hard to believe that the election was swung to a Conservative victory based solely on people who were retired.

The difference between retired people voting Conservative or Labour wasn't even the largest gap: whilst retired people voted for the Tories by a 39 point margin, students majoritively voted for Labour by a 45 point margin. The smallest margin out of every other demographic was part-time workers at a 4 point lead for Labour, which still seems like a fairly significant lead.

Based on the UK's OADR from 2016 (Number of people over 65 for every 1000 aged 16-64) in 2016 of 285, the proportion of the UK voting population that was retired in 2017 would have been around 22%-23%.

Whilst this isn't going to provide an exact number (data was taken a year before GE, UK citizens aged 16 & 17 are included in the data but cannot vote, some people retire before age 65) it should give a fair approximate, and it's unlikely that the retired population would have been over 25% of the entire voting population.

The same poll also gives a breakdown of the percentage of eligible voters within each age group that turned out to vote, and shows that older voters turned out more than younger ones. However, I still find it incomprehensible that there was enough of a turnout of retired people to override the numbers of voters in every other work status.

Is there any other evidence besides this YouGov poll that supports this data? Was the Conservative vote share victory in the 2017 election entirely due to retired people voting for them?

Answer 1

At first sight, I agree it looks a little puzzling, but consider that the Students were the only group that substantially preferred Labour ( 64% to 19% ), and there are not so many of them ( 3,092 students vs. 12,475 retired, weighted figures ), and their turnout was lower ( 67% to 80% retired ).

Of the other groups, the Labour lead is relatively small ( 45% to 39% for the largest other category, Full Time ).

Overall, the Conservative vote share victory ( 44% to 41% for Labour ) certainly wasn't entirely due to retired people voting conservative, but retired people were certainly an important factor in the result. They voted 63% Conservative, 25% Labour, and they had the highest turnout ( 80% ) of all the categories.

I worked out these figures ( on the weighted sample numbers ) to show how the Conservative victory came about.

C = Conservative, L = Labour.
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Students:    3092 x 67% = 2072.   C:383     L: 1,325  =  L + 942

Retired:    12476 x 80% = 9981.   C: 6,288  L: 2,395  =  C + 3,892

Full time:  21188 x 69% = 14,620. C: 5,701  L: 6,579  =  L + 878

Part time:   7722 x 66% = 5,097.  C: 2,038  L: 2,242  =  L + 204

Unemployed:  2172 x 45% = 977.    C: 273    L: 528    =  L + 255

Not working: 4195 x 57% = 2,381.  C: 860    L: 1,143  =  L + 283

Other:       1771 x 57% = 1,009   C: 302    L: 554    =  L + 252

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Total Labour margin in groups they won: 2,814
Total Conservative margin in Retired:   3,892

Overall difference is C + 1,078

This margin is 2% of the whole weighted sample ( including those who did not vote ), or 3% of those who voted (36,137). The large swing to C in the retired group is enough to outweigh the smaller swings in the other categories.