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What, though, should we do about the rump of Conservative and Labour voters? The easiest assumption is to count most Labour voters as pro-European, and most Tories as pro-Brexit.
However, data buried in Survation’s eve-of-election poll for the Daily Mail casts doubt on one of these two assumptions. To be sure, it confirms that the 14% who voted Labour divided 3-1 for staying in the EU. The more intriguing finding is that the 9% of voters who stayed loyal to the Tories divided exactly evenly.
Here are the figures.
The table shows what happened last week. People who would vote Conservative in a general election divide two-to-one in favour of Brexit. That’s a clear majority – though we should note that opinion among Tories is more balanced than that among Labour and Liberal Democrats.
Huge numbers of normally Tory pro-Brexit voters switched to the Brexit party; but far fewer Tory who voted Remain were attracted to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Hence the numerically small, but proportionally large, number of Tory pro-Europeans who did not defect.
It’s worth noting that the Remain/Leave balance is much the same for the 33% of voters who would back Labour in a general election as the 14% who voted Labour last week. Other polling data suggests that those Labour leavers who defected did so some weeks ago; the sharp drop in Labour support during the final fortnight of the recent campaign was almost wholly the consequence of Labour pro-Europeans switching to the Lib Dems and Greens. In any event, many more Labour pro-Europeans than Brexiters defected overall.
On these figures, then – as percentages of all voters last week – Labour’s 14% split 10.5% Remain, 3.5% Leave. Meanwhile the Tories’ 9% divided 4.5% for each side. Taken together, the 23% of Tory plus Labour voters divided 15% Remain, 8% Leave. Add these to the votes of the strongly pro-and anti-Brexit parties, and we end up with 55% Remain, 43% Leave.