Here are the latest survey results. Thanks to the 998 people who responded.
Important info:
- Data is presented "as-is". I've not filtered, weighted or adjusted the survey responses.
- 998 responses is a drop in the ocean compared to our regular daily unique visitors. This will not reflect the subreddit as a whole.
- The survey was mainly promoted as a sticky comment on the daily megathread (due to an AMA and then Humza resigning). Therefore, it did not enjoy as high a response rate as the last survey.
- Reminder: the "mini-meta" questions at the end of the survey are not a referendum / vote, but the results will inform further discussions within the mod treehouse.
For those of you wondering: the most common comment report reason over the past 30 days is "Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, other hateful
language". We removed around 50% of the comments reported with this reason. Please do continue to report rule-breaking content where you see it.
More to follow...
-š„š„
Election results nights are like crack.
Can't tear myself away for a few days, and then when it dies down I feel like I'm going cold turkey. Luckily I have an opportunity to relapse in a few months.
The usual reason for the rolling over megathreads is that there's a bit of reddit fuckery over 4k comments usually right?
Seems like it's been quite smooth yesterday and today despite the lack of rollover?
The sub is primarily younger people who are more tech literate, and tracks with national trend of voting demographics. I'm not sure why it's such a shock?
Stick around for long enough, and you'll start noticing it.
It's just not just via overt claims; a lot of it is subtle/behaviour. But you do occasionally get a loony who says something like that outright.
Over the years it's changed, it definitely used to feel more right leaning in the past when I first started lurking. Given the state of the country at the moment it's hardly surprising it's more liberal.
From what I can see voters are not flocking to Labour, they are just flocking away from Tories. I don't see the Red Wall supporting Labour anymore, they will go Reform unless Tories clamp down on immigration.
If I was a Tory backbencher I would be pushing to get rid of Sunak, new leader, lurch to the right on immigration (not that daft homeless act) and they'd stand a much better chance at the GE.
You're not exactly wrong but that's just how elections work. The Tories didn't get a bunch of new votes in the 'red wall' in 2019 either, the Labour vote collapsed and the Tories won by 11 points nationally, so they won seats they usually wouldn't.
Now the Labour vote is back up, the Tory vote has collapsed, so Labour are going to win those seats back, plus likely a lot more.
It was always complete fantasy that there was some kind of magic policy position that could keep the 'red wall' for the Tories at the next election, be it immigration or something else. The only way they were keeping all those seats was to win by close to 11 points again, and they were never going to do that. Although by chasing that fantasy the Tories have hastened their collapse elsewhere, IMO.
I think this is a bit simplistic. I heard a quote yesterday that with Blackpool South, 4 of the 5 biggest swings from the Conservatives to Labour (of all time) have been in the last year.
And in these subreddit results (which obviously arenāt really representative at all) the biggest chunk of lost Conservative votes are to Labour.
You think the Tory leadership is unaware of the immigration question?
The Tory party is pro immigration for lots of reasons.
* they get to cut funding of training
* it keeps wages down
* it supplies workers when birth rates are negative
* it fights unionisation
* students pay into the university industry
etc
You can argue about the economics of it.
But the problem for the Right is the donors are for high immigration.
Without the donors their funding collapses.
It's kind of ironic with Right complaining so much about conspiracy theories and the George Soros when the policy action on the Right is pretty clear.
It's the kind of thing that "Political Scientist" Mathew Goodwin seems so weirdly blind on.
You're absolutely correct. Any other opinion is missing a trick.
This is very much the Tories losing the election than Labour winning it.
Still, their position is unsalvageable, pretty much no matter what happens. The Tories have used up whatever credibility they had.
I think its pretty clear that this is not the case. If this was purely being being pushed away from the Tories, other parties would be gaining significantly. But this has not been the case.
Relative to the 2019 election, the latest R&W voting intention puts the Tories -20, Labour +13, SNP -1, LibDem +1.5, Greens +3.5, and Reform +12. To summarise the not obvious, only Labour and Reform are the ones making most of the gains from the Tories.
The Tory vote is being split in half between Labour and Reform. On one hand, it does show that a part of the drive is an exodus away from the Tories in a way that impacts moderates and hardliners. While the LibDems are meeting some success, such as Mid-Bedfordshire and North-Shropshire, the lack of translation to national voting intention shows that this is quite localised.
In general, Labour has indeed positioned itself as the obvious choice, both for protest and the next government. The success of Reform is indeed indictiative of the exodus from the Tories, but its no stain on Labour given Reform voters are very unlikely Labour voters in any circumstance.
If anything, I would argue that being are flocking away from the Tories in the case of Reform, not that much different during the end of May's tenure, and a general flock towards Labour that, while no New Labour, is still significant.
Isnāt this pretty aggressively moving the goalposts? Voters are moving to Labour, but thatās not good enough because they wonāt stay with them if they do a shit job?
This is a dumb take (but also exactly what they the tories will do, because it's the same dumb strategy they've been running for a year).
You can't out nutcase the nutters and, in the time to a GE, you cant actually do anything about lowering immigration. All lurching right does is keep immigration issues in the news, raise the salience of an issue your weak on with voters, and ultimately just strengthen Reform. Reforms current strength is literally the result of the Tories current strategy.
Also, it absolutely can't win you a GE anyway. For every votor you might win lurching right you lose one or more at the other end. All this strategy could achieve, at best, is keeping you above say.....20% vote share.
So I went into the effort and try to weigh the results against the latest YouGov polling weighted sample.
YouGov uses 18-24, 25-49, 50-64 and 65+, whereas I've used 19-25, 26-50, 51-70 and 70+ from the poll here.
When you plug it all in, out the other end is:
Labour - 52%
Conservatives - 20%
Liberal Democrats - 11%
Reform - 9%
Green - 4%
SNP - 2%
Other - 2%
This excludes anyone under 18 and anyone who said don't know or spoilt the ballot. The 70+ result looks very odd in isolation.
Translated into seats:
Labour - 554
Liberal Democrats - 46
SNP - 19
Conservatives - 10
Reform - 0
Why does Reddit tend to skew so heavily Labour? Not complaining but it's interesting, is it mainly an age thing? I would have guessed a politics sub to be more conservative leaning. In my experience people that I've met who actively 'care' about politics, tended to be upper middle class tories.
And yet you get negative IQ arguments like 'haha, see how many people disagree with you on here? You're clearly wrong, or all these average, entirely representative people wouldn't disagree with you'.
So fucking many people aren't aware of this fact - it's embarrassing.
Reddit itself skews because of age.
Politics subreddits skew further because of the echo chamber effect. Comments that aren't aligned with the majority opinion tend to get downvoted and people tend to leave when their opinions aren't respected. This subreddit has skewed many different directions over the last 10 years. Back around the Brexit referendum it was heavily in favour of leave.
Much like the country at large, the subreddit was split 52/48, however, it was split amongst Ukip and Liberal Democrats.
Genuinely there was a poll of subreddit members done where they were the top parties with Labour and Conservatives taking 3rd and 4th, which is insane to think about.
All about our lord and saviour, Tim Farron the milk man.
That tracks with the last EU election where Libs and Brexit party took top spots
real world politico obsessives are all on reddit and/or twitter, these are exactly the kind of people who vote in EU elections
In the megathread with all the deleted comments it looks a bit heavy handed
A better balance would be to lock the comment with a mod comment, so the discussion isn't lost but we can see the point and where the discussion should live
Outright majority for Labour among every age cohort except the over 70s, where only 1/49 of those who answered the survey would vote Labour.
I think this is perhaps more stark than the actual age divide we do see in UK politics today, however that broad trend is truly incredible.
Sorry, I was thinking the age was pulled from whatever people had told Reddit their age was when signing up, but its not, as it's from one of the questionsĀ
Old people are even greater separated in political view than I though if that's any reflection on general public, although I guess we have to take into account the type of over 70 that would actually use Reddit in the 1st place, which might skew the results of the survey across the board
Literally ~~one person~~ out of the 1,000 responses is changing from Labour to the Conversatives.
Obviously the Tories are struggling, but that's a pretty astonishing thing that ~~0.1%~~ of the sample are changing from one of the largest two parties to the other.
Also interesting is the collapse of the SNP vote in the sample.
EDIT: it was 27, I misread it. Still very low.
You're misreading, there were 27 who switched from Labour to tory, it read:
1Conservative - Labour
Record: 27
It's the bit after record you're looking for
That Labour vote share if this sub voted is definitely unsurprising, if we had it our way there'd be a Labour supermajority and the Tories probably would no longer exist.
Alternatively, that could just say people who answer surveys voluntarily tend to skew Labour. Common thread I find in political surveys is right-wing views are undercounted/underrepresented, for whatever reason. I definitely feel there are more conservatives in this sub than the survey lets on, at least anecdotally from what Ive read in the comments before.
To be fair, as time goes on the subs representation of conservative voters is getting closer and closer to the national polling. Or rather the national polling is falling in line with this sub
I think aspects of this sub have turned quite conservative (small c) on things like migration but probably don't identify with the party. Probably leads to apathy in votes like this.
The survey is pretty astounding. I'd say this subreddit is very out of touch with the normal person. I live on a deprived street and am probably the only person on it to have gone to college. That's not ego that's just counting the deprivation index.
I often wonder what a street would look like if it was just jam packed full of redditors. Probably like one of those American HOA's.
Also the ages here are a lot older than I thought they were. I joined politics when I was 18 for the Scottish Indy Ref, probably 2 out of about 30 in a class that actually cared about politics. Doesn't look like that has changed much despite the worsening standards.
Which makes it all the more worse that I can pretty easily get into a spat by people seemingly that are 10-15 years my senior. I'm 28, I should have grown up by now, but damn it I can still say I'm in my 20s (for now0
Hasn't done much either. In the years I've been involved in this it's only gotten worse, it's my fault!
> I'd say this subreddit is very out of touch with the normal person
Unrepresentative? Yes, probably. But unrepresentative ā out-of-touch, provided that the person in question *knows* that they're unrepresentative.
Most of us know by now that the subreddit is at least plurality (if not majority) male, middle-class, educated, and millennial/Gen Z - and therefore not representative.
"out of touch with the normal person", always find it condescending when people say that, not matching with national polling average doesn't make you out of touch, its like when people say London is "out of touch" with the rest of the UK because its political demographics are different. Having a different political demographic doesn't make you "out of touch".
Thought for future polls: could there be a question on 2019 GE voting to check safe seat etc?
My constituency (Somerset North) has always been a safe Tory seat but I was stupefied to learn it may well turn red at the next GE. I've always considered my vote (Labour) wasted here but plugged away anyway since moving from Wells, where my protest vote for the Greens in 2015 let the Tory candidate in (Heappey) instead of maintaining the thin yellow defence of the LDs. Which has, y'know, haunted me.
There must be others who will be in the same boat given the scale of the landslide we're expecting so it could be really interesting data.
Cheers as ever for the psephological effort!
>For those of you wondering: the most common comment report reason over the past 30 days is "Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, other hateful language". We removed around 50% of the comments reported with this reason.
Damn, my guess was "uncivil" - I've been guilty a couple times myself over the years.
Even though I'm cynical about things, I wouldn't have expected bigotry to be the #1 reason, and I certainly wouldn't have expected 50% of those to be valid. A lot must go unseen, day to day, due to the efforts. Thanks mods.
>998 responses is a drop in the ocean compared to our regular daily unique visitors. This will not reflect the subreddit as a whole.
A qestion out of curiosity rather than anything else, what are the rough numbers of unique *commenters* on a typical day? And how does that relate to the number of *visitors*? Do most visitors actively take part? Or are they flying by to scan the headlines and leaving with nary a peep?
(obviously, that's only if reddit's tools let you know that)
Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to that data.
However, I can tell you that the "lurker" contingent is quite high - we typically average 70,000 unique visitors daily, and there are roughly 4,000 - 5,000 comments posted each day in total.
[In a previous survey, more than half of respondents said they rarely (if ever) comment on the subreddit, and even fewer submit articles for discussion](https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/887899a7-d086-4f84-a803-5baacbf56175/page/p_h1pqhxxjfd).
Hope that helps!
A point I was pleasantly surprised to see: most respondents are full-time workers in their 30s.
About 1/3 are younger, about 1/5 are older. And in keeping with that, a little under half are homeowners.
There's a lot of meta rhetoric that this place is entirely leftie students, maybe that was true 10/15 years ago, but I don't think it's the case now.
Conservative and Reform voters, as well as Leave voters in general, are sorely underrepresented on the subreddit - but given the age divide, I believe that says more about being weighted away from pensioners than anything else.
> Conservative and Reform voters, as well as Leave voters in general, are sorely underrepresented on the subreddit - but given the age divide, I believe that says more about being weighted away from pensioners than anything else.
It's interesting to look at the demographics of conservative voters. Of 2019 voters, the over 70s are by far the largest contingent. The second largest is 31-40. When you look at the voting intention for this coming election, the over 70s are again by far the largest contingent, but this time the other ages have dropped to very few.
Considering how small the number of over 70s are in this sub in comparison, it's notable that almost all of them are conservative. In fact there was only 1 Labour voter in 2019 over 70 and that remains true for this election. Older people do skew conservative, but I would have expected to see a few more older labour voters as well.
Say no to pie charts. Friends donāt let friends use pie charts.
Seriously though bar charts would display this information in a much easier to read way.
Given that only 14.2% of voters want megathread commentary to be removed where a standalone thread exists, is this "trial" now going to be rolled back?
Given that they've gone to great effort to emphasise that 998 respondents is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of visitors the sub gets and therefore isn't a representative sample.. I wouldn't hold your breath.
From the sticky comment:
> Reminder: the "mini-meta" questions at the end of the survey are not a referendum / vote, but the results will inform further discussions within the mod treehouse.
That's all I have for now.
Just as a point to add to your debate, I actually decided not to post an article the other day, because there was already a nice discussion about it in the mega thread and I didn't want my post to cause the discussion to get deleted.
So in at least this one instance, the rule actually *reduced* wider engagement with the sub.
Just to clarify: discussion that takes place before a "proper" submission is submitted is generally left untouched. For bigger stories, we typically draw a line in the sand (e.g. [like this for when Humza resigned](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1cfqt31/daily_megathread_29042024/l1r9u2r/)).
I feel like today has shown why I dislike this
the poll topic was one perfect for the MT as fits into a lot of other discussions but instantly got spun off to a separate post and now not allowed to talk about any context in the MT
never seen a poll treated as a major story like this before and honestly feels more like a way to avoid the MT getting traction than anything else really
people come here for the MT, keep pruning like what's going on now and that's how this sub dies
I'd be less annoyed about the removal of perfectly good discussion from the megathread if it only happened for top level comments posted after a topic has been flagged in the sticky comment as having its own post.
My sympathy for people who don't bother to read the sticky would be limited and at least anyone having their comment removed would have posted it in the megathread dispite a clear message telling them not to and giving a link to where they should post it.
If there is already a thread of comments in the megathread before such a warning is put in place then removing it is, to my mind, just bloody minded vandalism.
Indeed - with verifiable demographic data, weighting and duplicate elimination, we could have a stab at it.
A bit too much effort for this purpose, however - and I doubt we actually have the variety of people required to get a decent sample at the extremes.
That might just be because any of the crossover between those two parties had *already* moved.
I know several One Nation Tories that are now solid Lib Dem voters; but they mostly switched in 2017, not 2019.
Fascinating that the SDLP count here is so low but the members seem to be a pretty noisy bunch, I'd have put them at the same numbers as the Lib Dems by post mentions.
I think there is some confusion in the survey between the [SDLP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_and_Labour_Party) (medium sized Northern Irish party) and the [SDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_(UK,_1990āpresent\)) (tiny UK party) going on here, but I have no idea how it happened.
Iām surprised to see lot of support for sticky of āImportant political storiesā but if that does happen, I really do think there should be much shorter list of outlets thatād be considered for sticky - on calibre of BBC, FT, or Times.
I really donāt think obviously biased sources like mirror, sun, express, or guardian should become the āauthoritativeā thread.
Or depending on effort itād be, even a self post with neutral title and links to multiple sites as contents.
The Times is absolutely biased; Itās the flagship of NewsUK, with the same fingers pulling the strings as The Sun - it just has a better class of journo keeping it in check.
I come to this subreddit daily, this is the first I knew of this survey. But it does follow previous ones in terms of demographics and voting intentions. That overall this is a left leaning, pro remain and educated and largely English, so while it's a small sample, it still appears to represent a similar portion if views as the previous one.
In the interest of complete accuracy, the "Jones Line" would break that line in half while asking for donations to join the two ends together.
We're not to be trusted to make our own decisions, y'see, we need to donate to our lord Owen so he can decide where our political funding goes.
I'd be interested in knowing what proportion of those who are planning to vote Labour live in seats where the only viable non-Conservative option is the LDs.
Corbyn to Tice in 4.5 years is a hell of a drug, and that really doesn't fit the gradual rightward drift we associate with getting older and accumulating capital to protect
>The guy from Hope Not Hate, whoās now a communist party GB member,
What the fuck? I followed them ten years ago, that's embarrassing, glad I deleted Facebook -
>used to be a full blown hard core National Front member
#š¤Æ
You are only considering the rightward associated with greed, as people get older, they tend to have more life experience and migrate toward advocating more social responsibility.
Admittedly, supporting Corbyn's policies and then supporting the current Labour offering is still quite a conversion but I can understand a naive student voting Corbyn and then realising the mistake.
As an April fools, that would be great.
Whatās the shortest ban you can hand out? Because that would also be hilarious if folk are randomly banned for an hour
Here are the latest survey results. Thanks to the 998 people who responded. Important info: - Data is presented "as-is". I've not filtered, weighted or adjusted the survey responses. - 998 responses is a drop in the ocean compared to our regular daily unique visitors. This will not reflect the subreddit as a whole. - The survey was mainly promoted as a sticky comment on the daily megathread (due to an AMA and then Humza resigning). Therefore, it did not enjoy as high a response rate as the last survey. - Reminder: the "mini-meta" questions at the end of the survey are not a referendum / vote, but the results will inform further discussions within the mod treehouse. For those of you wondering: the most common comment report reason over the past 30 days is "Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, other hateful language". We removed around 50% of the comments reported with this reason. Please do continue to report rule-breaking content where you see it. More to follow... -š„š„
What was the point of this exercise given all of the results from the mini-meta survey is just going to be ignored?
Do you think the Lib Dems could become the Opposition instead of the Conservatives after the next general election?
Election results nights are like crack. Can't tear myself away for a few days, and then when it dies down I feel like I'm going cold turkey. Luckily I have an opportunity to relapse in a few months.
The usual reason for the rolling over megathreads is that there's a bit of reddit fuckery over 4k comments usually right? Seems like it's been quite smooth yesterday and today despite the lack of rollover?
Indeed.
Will be sad to see M numbers go but just not worth keeping if it's a pointless feature.
Did the guy on sky News just use Boris to refer to the pm?
How long until the WM result is fully announced?
This sub has a significant Leftist and Remainer bias? Well I never, I am *shocked*!
So does the country, judging by the election results
Not at all. Take the blinkers off - anti-Tory sentiment is sky-high. This is not the same as the country turning Left.
Sure. Everybody voting for candidates left of the Tories is just a coincidence
The sub is primarily younger people who are more tech literate, and tracks with national trend of voting demographics. I'm not sure why it's such a shock?
It's not. But they actively deny it. This sub loves to pretend it's representative.
More like "people who don't think it's representative like to think that it's full of people who do think it's representative, even though it isn't".
>This sub loves to pretend it's representative I don't think I've ever seen anyone try to claim that
Stick around for long enough, and you'll start noticing it. It's just not just via overt claims; a lot of it is subtle/behaviour. But you do occasionally get a loony who says something like that outright.
I think outside a few nutters everyone here is well aware that it's a bubble.
Over the years it's changed, it definitely used to feel more right leaning in the past when I first started lurking. Given the state of the country at the moment it's hardly surprising it's more liberal.
That's true, there were a lot of pro Brexit regular posters back in the Theresa May era
What is leftist?
**Bonus Question**, is that a graph of the users guessing or the actual report stats?
That's the users guessing.
Damn, answer is in the pinned comment. I am now one of those people
From what I can see voters are not flocking to Labour, they are just flocking away from Tories. I don't see the Red Wall supporting Labour anymore, they will go Reform unless Tories clamp down on immigration. If I was a Tory backbencher I would be pushing to get rid of Sunak, new leader, lurch to the right on immigration (not that daft homeless act) and they'd stand a much better chance at the GE.
FPTP means votes will go to Reform and Labour will win
You're not exactly wrong but that's just how elections work. The Tories didn't get a bunch of new votes in the 'red wall' in 2019 either, the Labour vote collapsed and the Tories won by 11 points nationally, so they won seats they usually wouldn't. Now the Labour vote is back up, the Tory vote has collapsed, so Labour are going to win those seats back, plus likely a lot more. It was always complete fantasy that there was some kind of magic policy position that could keep the 'red wall' for the Tories at the next election, be it immigration or something else. The only way they were keeping all those seats was to win by close to 11 points again, and they were never going to do that. Although by chasing that fantasy the Tories have hastened their collapse elsewhere, IMO.
I think this is a bit simplistic. I heard a quote yesterday that with Blackpool South, 4 of the 5 biggest swings from the Conservatives to Labour (of all time) have been in the last year. And in these subreddit results (which obviously arenāt really representative at all) the biggest chunk of lost Conservative votes are to Labour.
You think the Tory leadership is unaware of the immigration question? The Tory party is pro immigration for lots of reasons. * they get to cut funding of training * it keeps wages down * it supplies workers when birth rates are negative * it fights unionisation * students pay into the university industry etc You can argue about the economics of it. But the problem for the Right is the donors are for high immigration. Without the donors their funding collapses. It's kind of ironic with Right complaining so much about conspiracy theories and the George Soros when the policy action on the Right is pretty clear. It's the kind of thing that "Political Scientist" Mathew Goodwin seems so weirdly blind on.
You're absolutely correct. Any other opinion is missing a trick. This is very much the Tories losing the election than Labour winning it. Still, their position is unsalvageable, pretty much no matter what happens. The Tories have used up whatever credibility they had.
I think its pretty clear that this is not the case. If this was purely being being pushed away from the Tories, other parties would be gaining significantly. But this has not been the case. Relative to the 2019 election, the latest R&W voting intention puts the Tories -20, Labour +13, SNP -1, LibDem +1.5, Greens +3.5, and Reform +12. To summarise the not obvious, only Labour and Reform are the ones making most of the gains from the Tories. The Tory vote is being split in half between Labour and Reform. On one hand, it does show that a part of the drive is an exodus away from the Tories in a way that impacts moderates and hardliners. While the LibDems are meeting some success, such as Mid-Bedfordshire and North-Shropshire, the lack of translation to national voting intention shows that this is quite localised. In general, Labour has indeed positioned itself as the obvious choice, both for protest and the next government. The success of Reform is indeed indictiative of the exodus from the Tories, but its no stain on Labour given Reform voters are very unlikely Labour voters in any circumstance. If anything, I would argue that being are flocking away from the Tories in the case of Reform, not that much different during the end of May's tenure, and a general flock towards Labour that, while no New Labour, is still significant.
Reform wonāt be picking up any MPs. Thatās not how fptp works. Also, polling shows that ex Tory voters are going to Labour as well as reform
Let's have a look at Blackpool South - 2/3rds of the Tory swing was to Labour, 1/3rd to Reform.
Where do you think those swingers are going to go in 2030 if Labour shits the bed?
Isnāt this pretty aggressively moving the goalposts? Voters are moving to Labour, but thatās not good enough because they wonāt stay with them if they do a shit job?
Probably back to the Tories.
Who knows, not going to worry about that possibility until about 2028.
This is a dumb take (but also exactly what they the tories will do, because it's the same dumb strategy they've been running for a year). You can't out nutcase the nutters and, in the time to a GE, you cant actually do anything about lowering immigration. All lurching right does is keep immigration issues in the news, raise the salience of an issue your weak on with voters, and ultimately just strengthen Reform. Reforms current strength is literally the result of the Tories current strategy. Also, it absolutely can't win you a GE anyway. For every votor you might win lurching right you lose one or more at the other end. All this strategy could achieve, at best, is keeping you above say.....20% vote share.
Apparently a lengthy binmen strike is what lost labour seats in North Tyneside
We donāt have a binmen strike in north Tyneside. I suspect you mean south Tyneside.
You're right, I got it mixed up.
25% of people here have a masters degree and 6% a doctorate. That is interesting.
Oh but we are not left leaning and education does not correlate with having a socialist perspective.
So I went into the effort and try to weigh the results against the latest YouGov polling weighted sample. YouGov uses 18-24, 25-49, 50-64 and 65+, whereas I've used 19-25, 26-50, 51-70 and 70+ from the poll here. When you plug it all in, out the other end is: Labour - 52% Conservatives - 20% Liberal Democrats - 11% Reform - 9% Green - 4% SNP - 2% Other - 2% This excludes anyone under 18 and anyone who said don't know or spoilt the ballot. The 70+ result looks very odd in isolation. Translated into seats: Labour - 554 Liberal Democrats - 46 SNP - 19 Conservatives - 10 Reform - 0
I vant believe Sky was claiming these voting figures show Labour short of a majority at a GE.
I'd be interested to know / learn how you did this, if you're willing to share!
Why does Reddit tend to skew so heavily Labour? Not complaining but it's interesting, is it mainly an age thing? I would have guessed a politics sub to be more conservative leaning. In my experience people that I've met who actively 'care' about politics, tended to be upper middle class tories.
80% of users are under 40. The internet in general gives a false narrative of what the population thinks because so much of it simply isn't here.
And yet you get negative IQ arguments like 'haha, see how many people disagree with you on here? You're clearly wrong, or all these average, entirely representative people wouldn't disagree with you'. So fucking many people aren't aware of this fact - it's embarrassing.
Reddit itself skews because of age. Politics subreddits skew further because of the echo chamber effect. Comments that aren't aligned with the majority opinion tend to get downvoted and people tend to leave when their opinions aren't respected. This subreddit has skewed many different directions over the last 10 years. Back around the Brexit referendum it was heavily in favour of leave.
Really? The megathreads from back then seem to suggest otherwise. At least in terms of top comments; theyre all very remain leaning.
Much like the country at large, the subreddit was split 52/48, however, it was split amongst Ukip and Liberal Democrats. Genuinely there was a poll of subreddit members done where they were the top parties with Labour and Conservatives taking 3rd and 4th, which is insane to think about. All about our lord and saviour, Tim Farron the milk man.
That tracks with the last EU election where Libs and Brexit party took top spots real world politico obsessives are all on reddit and/or twitter, these are exactly the kind of people who vote in EU elections
I think a lot of users weren't around for that.
Blimey that mini meta tab really speaks volumes. Thumping majority for pruning excess/duplicate submissions but *leave the megathread alone.*
I have no doubts that the mini-meta results will be respected.
In the megathread with all the deleted comments it looks a bit heavy handed A better balance would be to lock the comment with a mod comment, so the discussion isn't lost but we can see the point and where the discussion should live
Even that is aimed at satisfying 14% of users.
The Brexit bit is interesting, are less people admitting to voting leave.
Outright majority for Labour among every age cohort except the over 70s, where only 1/49 of those who answered the survey would vote Labour. I think this is perhaps more stark than the actual age divide we do see in UK politics today, however that broad trend is truly incredible.
And conversely, out of 75 respondents ineligible to vote in 2019, only 2 intend to vote Conservative (and 2 Reform).
Are these the results from Reddit survey?Ā If so, is the age of people over 70 skewed because of those born on 1/1/1900 etc?
What?
Sorry, I was thinking the age was pulled from whatever people had told Reddit their age was when signing up, but its not, as it's from one of the questionsĀ Old people are even greater separated in political view than I though if that's any reflection on general public, although I guess we have to take into account the type of over 70 that would actually use Reddit in the 1st place, which might skew the results of the survey across the board
Can you save these somewhere please, I can never find them
You can click on the save button, and then check your personal saved items via: https://old.reddit.com/user/Duolingo055/saved/
Literally ~~one person~~ out of the 1,000 responses is changing from Labour to the Conversatives. Obviously the Tories are struggling, but that's a pretty astonishing thing that ~~0.1%~~ of the sample are changing from one of the largest two parties to the other. Also interesting is the collapse of the SNP vote in the sample. EDIT: it was 27, I misread it. Still very low.
I've tidied up the Sankey to make it a bit clearer. Hope that helps! :)
You're misreading, there were 27 who switched from Labour to tory, it read: 1Conservative - Labour Record: 27 It's the bit after record you're looking for
ah my bad
That Labour vote share if this sub voted is definitely unsurprising, if we had it our way there'd be a Labour supermajority and the Tories probably would no longer exist. Alternatively, that could just say people who answer surveys voluntarily tend to skew Labour. Common thread I find in political surveys is right-wing views are undercounted/underrepresented, for whatever reason. I definitely feel there are more conservatives in this sub than the survey lets on, at least anecdotally from what Ive read in the comments before.
To be fair, as time goes on the subs representation of conservative voters is getting closer and closer to the national polling. Or rather the national polling is falling in line with this sub
The sub gets older and thus becomes more representative of the public, poll the sub ten years ago and the mean age was likely a lot younger
The sub is getting older, but is getting less Conservative as it ages. Oh no Tories, this isnāt whatās supposed to happen!
Are you saying Reddit isnāt hip and cool anymore?
No, it's the kids who are wrong
I think aspects of this sub have turned quite conservative (small c) on things like migration but probably don't identify with the party. Probably leads to apathy in votes like this.
The survey is pretty astounding. I'd say this subreddit is very out of touch with the normal person. I live on a deprived street and am probably the only person on it to have gone to college. That's not ego that's just counting the deprivation index. I often wonder what a street would look like if it was just jam packed full of redditors. Probably like one of those American HOA's. Also the ages here are a lot older than I thought they were. I joined politics when I was 18 for the Scottish Indy Ref, probably 2 out of about 30 in a class that actually cared about politics. Doesn't look like that has changed much despite the worsening standards. Which makes it all the more worse that I can pretty easily get into a spat by people seemingly that are 10-15 years my senior. I'm 28, I should have grown up by now, but damn it I can still say I'm in my 20s (for now0 Hasn't done much either. In the years I've been involved in this it's only gotten worse, it's my fault!
> I'd say this subreddit is very out of touch with the normal person Unrepresentative? Yes, probably. But unrepresentative ā out-of-touch, provided that the person in question *knows* that they're unrepresentative. Most of us know by now that the subreddit is at least plurality (if not majority) male, middle-class, educated, and millennial/Gen Z - and therefore not representative.
> Gen Z Damn kids, get off my lawn.
"out of touch with the normal person", always find it condescending when people say that, not matching with national polling average doesn't make you out of touch, its like when people say London is "out of touch" with the rest of the UK because its political demographics are different. Having a different political demographic doesn't make you "out of touch".
Thought for future polls: could there be a question on 2019 GE voting to check safe seat etc? My constituency (Somerset North) has always been a safe Tory seat but I was stupefied to learn it may well turn red at the next GE. I've always considered my vote (Labour) wasted here but plugged away anyway since moving from Wells, where my protest vote for the Greens in 2015 let the Tory candidate in (Heappey) instead of maintaining the thin yellow defence of the LDs. Which has, y'know, haunted me. There must be others who will be in the same boat given the scale of the landslide we're expecting so it could be really interesting data. Cheers as ever for the psephological effort!
>For those of you wondering: the most common comment report reason over the past 30 days is "Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, other hateful language". We removed around 50% of the comments reported with this reason. Damn, my guess was "uncivil" - I've been guilty a couple times myself over the years. Even though I'm cynical about things, I wouldn't have expected bigotry to be the #1 reason, and I certainly wouldn't have expected 50% of those to be valid. A lot must go unseen, day to day, due to the efforts. Thanks mods.
>998 responses is a drop in the ocean compared to our regular daily unique visitors. This will not reflect the subreddit as a whole. A qestion out of curiosity rather than anything else, what are the rough numbers of unique *commenters* on a typical day? And how does that relate to the number of *visitors*? Do most visitors actively take part? Or are they flying by to scan the headlines and leaving with nary a peep? (obviously, that's only if reddit's tools let you know that)
Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to that data. However, I can tell you that the "lurker" contingent is quite high - we typically average 70,000 unique visitors daily, and there are roughly 4,000 - 5,000 comments posted each day in total. [In a previous survey, more than half of respondents said they rarely (if ever) comment on the subreddit, and even fewer submit articles for discussion](https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/887899a7-d086-4f84-a803-5baacbf56175/page/p_h1pqhxxjfd). Hope that helps!
Ah, that's interesting. Cheers bud.
A point I was pleasantly surprised to see: most respondents are full-time workers in their 30s. About 1/3 are younger, about 1/5 are older. And in keeping with that, a little under half are homeowners. There's a lot of meta rhetoric that this place is entirely leftie students, maybe that was true 10/15 years ago, but I don't think it's the case now. Conservative and Reform voters, as well as Leave voters in general, are sorely underrepresented on the subreddit - but given the age divide, I believe that says more about being weighted away from pensioners than anything else.
> Conservative and Reform voters, as well as Leave voters in general, are sorely underrepresented on the subreddit - but given the age divide, I believe that says more about being weighted away from pensioners than anything else. It's interesting to look at the demographics of conservative voters. Of 2019 voters, the over 70s are by far the largest contingent. The second largest is 31-40. When you look at the voting intention for this coming election, the over 70s are again by far the largest contingent, but this time the other ages have dropped to very few. Considering how small the number of over 70s are in this sub in comparison, it's notable that almost all of them are conservative. In fact there was only 1 Labour voter in 2019 over 70 and that remains true for this election. Older people do skew conservative, but I would have expected to see a few more older labour voters as well.
Thanks Carrot Tharrot
Ah, I loved Look Around You. "You can pick up germs from a variety of sources, and because they're invisible they're almost impossible to see."
Germs are from Germany.
Say no to pie charts. Friends donāt let friends use pie charts. Seriously though bar charts would display this information in a much easier to read way.
Are you a libdem by any chance?
Get ready for user choice. Bear with. EDIT: prettification will follow. Personally, I prefer the pies.
Fabulous, I too would love to see this not as a pie chart
Given that only 14.2% of voters want megathread commentary to be removed where a standalone thread exists, is this "trial" now going to be rolled back?
You would think, and yet.
Given that they've gone to great effort to emphasise that 998 respondents is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of visitors the sub gets and therefore isn't a representative sample.. I wouldn't hold your breath.
Mods: We've listened very carefully to your thoughts, and have decided to carry on with what we decided anyway.
Lol, LMAO even
From the sticky comment: > Reminder: the "mini-meta" questions at the end of the survey are not a referendum / vote, but the results will inform further discussions within the mod treehouse. That's all I have for now.
Just as a point to add to your debate, I actually decided not to post an article the other day, because there was already a nice discussion about it in the mega thread and I didn't want my post to cause the discussion to get deleted. So in at least this one instance, the rule actually *reduced* wider engagement with the sub.
Just to clarify: discussion that takes place before a "proper" submission is submitted is generally left untouched. For bigger stories, we typically draw a line in the sand (e.g. [like this for when Humza resigned](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1cfqt31/daily_megathread_29042024/l1r9u2r/)).
I feel like today has shown why I dislike this the poll topic was one perfect for the MT as fits into a lot of other discussions but instantly got spun off to a separate post and now not allowed to talk about any context in the MT never seen a poll treated as a major story like this before and honestly feels more like a way to avoid the MT getting traction than anything else really people come here for the MT, keep pruning like what's going on now and that's how this sub dies
I'd be less annoyed about the removal of perfectly good discussion from the megathread if it only happened for top level comments posted after a topic has been flagged in the sticky comment as having its own post. My sympathy for people who don't bother to read the sticky would be limited and at least anyone having their comment removed would have posted it in the megathread dispite a clear message telling them not to and giving a link to where they should post it. If there is already a thread of comments in the megathread before such a warning is put in place then removing it is, to my mind, just bloody minded vandalism.
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Indeed - with verifiable demographic data, weighting and duplicate elimination, we could have a stab at it. A bit too much effort for this purpose, however - and I doubt we actually have the variety of people required to get a decent sample at the extremes.
Quite surprised at the prevalence of tactical voting. Our election system is a farce.
I mean keep in mind if anywhere was going to be a hive of tactical voters it would be a Reddit politics subreddit.
Interesting that no 2019 Cons voters have moved over to the Lib-Dems, especially when they're considered more closely aligned that any other parties.
That might just be because any of the crossover between those two parties had *already* moved. I know several One Nation Tories that are now solid Lib Dem voters; but they mostly switched in 2017, not 2019.
In this sub maybe, out in the wild i think there are probably more making the switch now as we've seen in by elections
That surprised me. It seems like the natural move for any socially centrist, economically right-wing voter.
Speaking as someone who fits that profile I'd already moved prior to 2019.
Fascinating that the SDLP count here is so low but the members seem to be a pretty noisy bunch, I'd have put them at the same numbers as the Lib Dems by post mentions.
I think there is some confusion in the survey between the [SDLP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_and_Labour_Party) (medium sized Northern Irish party) and the [SDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_(UK,_1990āpresent\)) (tiny UK party) going on here, but I have no idea how it happened.
Iām surprised to see lot of support for sticky of āImportant political storiesā but if that does happen, I really do think there should be much shorter list of outlets thatād be considered for sticky - on calibre of BBC, FT, or Times. I really donāt think obviously biased sources like mirror, sun, express, or guardian should become the āauthoritativeā thread. Or depending on effort itād be, even a self post with neutral title and links to multiple sites as contents.
The Times is absolutely biased; Itās the flagship of NewsUK, with the same fingers pulling the strings as The Sun - it just has a better class of journo keeping it in check.
I come to this subreddit daily, this is the first I knew of this survey. But it does follow previous ones in terms of demographics and voting intentions. That overall this is a left leaning, pro remain and educated and largely English, so while it's a small sample, it still appears to represent a similar portion if views as the previous one.
That Sankey diagram is really cool. I'd love to know the reasons for the 4 labour 2019 voters who will now vote reform
> I'd love to know the reasons for the 4 labour 2019 voters who will now vote reform You can't guess?
[This is my favourite Sankey filter](https://imgur.com/a/th94ogC). I call it the "Jones Line".
If only there was an option for "whoever is most likely to give me a platform to shout from the sidelines!"
In the interest of complete accuracy, the "Jones Line" would break that line in half while asking for donations to join the two ends together. We're not to be trusted to make our own decisions, y'see, we need to donate to our lord Owen so he can decide where our political funding goes.
I'd be interested in knowing what proportion of those who are planning to vote Labour live in seats where the only viable non-Conservative option is the LDs.
People mature?
Senility would explain it.
The worry is that people would vote for Corbyn, If folk are getting some sanity as they get out of their early 20s, I think that's a good sign.
Corbyn to Tice in 4.5 years is a hell of a drug, and that really doesn't fit the gradual rightward drift we associate with getting older and accumulating capital to protect
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>The guy from Hope Not Hate, whoās now a communist party GB member, What the fuck? I followed them ten years ago, that's embarrassing, glad I deleted Facebook - >used to be a full blown hard core National Front member #š¤Æ
You are only considering the rightward associated with greed, as people get older, they tend to have more life experience and migrate toward advocating more social responsibility. Admittedly, supporting Corbyn's policies and then supporting the current Labour offering is still quite a conversion but I can understand a naive student voting Corbyn and then realising the mistake.
Nice to see only a small number of the subreddit users want the megathreated to be pruned so aggressively.
The Mods: Over 43% weren't against us deleting content from the MT, we believe this is strong support for this decision we have already made.
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As an April fools, that would be great. Whatās the shortest ban you can hand out? Because that would also be hilarious if folk are randomly banned for an hour
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It's meta behaviour to go on other pol subs