Who are the Labour Voters in May 2026?

An occasional series on main political Parties & their demographic support.

First of all I suppose I should possibly title this “Who were the Labour Voters in 2026” because with the rise of the Green Party all bets are off at the moment. As well as that we have the local elections coming up which by the sound of things are going to go badly for Labour. But Local Elections are not like General Elections. They have a much lower turnout and can often be seen as a safe place to make a protest vote.

Consequently I’m using the last two General Elections as the database. I’ve built a table of the demographics for every constituency in the country. This is so I can examine the demographics for every winning Labour seat and potentially see which are vulnerable and which are not.

Labour’s National Vote Base

But first of all lets look at what could be called Labours national core vote

Here’s the total number of people who have voted in every general elect back to 1987

So the Labour vote in 2024 that gave them a landslide victory was actually the third lowest vote they have had in the last forty years. Notably it was considerably lower than that achieved by Jeremy Corbyn when he lost in 2017.

Only in the 1997 General Election was the overall National voter turn-out high for a Labour victory. In 2001, 2005 and now in 2024 the national turn-out was low and in two cases actually below 60%

But it looks like there is (or maybe was) an irreducible core Labour vote of around 9.5 million.

Labour Support by Age Group

So what age group(s) support Labour? Of course all age groups support and vote Labour. But there is a heavy bias towards younger voters.

Even though Labour has a very large lead in young supporters this does not necessarily lead to more votes. Turn-out (aka those who actually vote) for the 18 -24 age group is dismal.

Turn-out by Age Group 2024 general Election

Here’s the estimated turn-out by age group for 2024.

The reason the Ipsos figure is lower is that it includes ALL people within that age group. Many people are not even registered to vote and they do not even show up as non-voters in statistics based on registered voters.

Proportion of Party Vote by Age Group 2024

If you take an average of all the winning seats per party in 2024 you get this:

NOTE: The above figures relate to the electorate size for that age group NOT the number of that age group who voted for the respective party.

Notice how (Nationally) Labour winning seats have a lower overall turn-out and a higher percentage of young voters. Meanwhile the demographics of winning seats for the Conservative, Reform and Lib-Dems are very similar to each other. They have more support from older voters and less from the young than Labour or the Greens.

You may think that a few percent on these averages will make few differences. If they average were the same across all seats that possibly would be true. But the average hides massive differences within parties and particularly within the Labour party.

So Why the 2024 Landslide?

It also helps explain the last Labour victory. The fall in turn-out between 2019 and 2024 of 7.4% meant 3 million voters stayed at home. Older people are the predominant voting group. Statistically their vote per capita is worth twice that of young electorate members. Predominantly the 65+ age group voted for the Conservatives. But in 2024, disillusioned, many stayed at home. More voted Reform.

While Labour lost votes from 2019 to 2024, they lost far fewer votes than the Conservatives. Consequentially they actually won some seats from the Conservatives when they achieved a lower vote count in that particular seat than they did in 2019!

Labour and the Next general Election

This was written before Labour’s calamitous local election results in early May 2026 which were significantly worse than even I was expecting. So I’ll let the dust settle a bit before making any predictions. But I’ll leave what I wrote as a reminder I need to still do this!

But it is not rosy for Labour. They have many seats that depend on both a loyal Labour young vote and a low turnout. If either of those items change (and both may well do) they are likely to get hammered.

In a future post ’ll list the seats I think will either fall to the Greens or get them a close run. At the other end I’ll look for Labour seats that could fall to Reform though I think these are far fewer.

Looking at it the other way round I think it fair to say that the list of seats Labour could win off other parties would be more-or-less empty.

This post was originally published on SubStack but has been moved here. Heres why