A poll in the leadup to the last election suggested the left might be losing its grip on the youth vote. What is the broader pattern, asks Max Rashbrooke.
Quite apart from the overall defeat it delivered, last year’s election seemed to spell bad news for the left in one key demographic: the youth. A Guardian Essential poll, taken in August 2023, showed just one-third of voters under 35 were backing Labour and the Greens, against one-half supporting National and ACT. The “youthquake” that in 2017 helped propel Jacinda Ardern to power had been replaced with frustration over a lack of social progress and “an overwhelming sense of exhaustion” among young voters, Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick argued.
The poll also seemed to echo trends offshore. In the UK, after 14 years of calamitous mismanagement, the Tories may be so hated that they can command the support of just one in seven young people. But US president Joe Biden has lost vast swathes of young voters discombobulated by the first inflationary crisis of their short lives. One survey has Donald Trump winning the Gen Z vote by 43 points to 42. North of the border, a poll taken last year put Canada’s left-wing Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, some 12 points behind the Conservatives among voters under 30.
So are New Zealand’s young voters shifting right? The answer to this question starts with data from polling firm Talbot Mills, which shows that, two decades ago, voters aged 18-24 – and to a lesser extent 25-29 – were solidly left-wing. Some 62% of the youngest female voters, and 50% of their male counterparts, backed Labour or the Greens. Older voters, by contrast, were increasingly conservative, at least until age 60.
Fast-forward to 2024, and the pattern is broadly the same. Although young women have shifted even further left, nearly three-quarters of them backing either Labour, Greens or Te Pāti Māori, their male counterparts are exactly as left-wing as they had been two decades before. The kids may be alright, but they are certainly not all right. If rising conservativism is visible anywhere, it is in the older age brackets: left-wing support among men aged 70-74, for instance, has cratered, from nearly one-half to just one-quarter. Nor should this come as a surprise, given the number of older men publicly venting their objections to co-governance and cancel culture.
How, then, can we explain last year’s Guardian poll? Turns out young voters are less independent than one might have thought. Talbot Mills has data right back to 1991 on what might be called the youth’s leftward bias: the lead that left-wing parties have over right-wing ones among the under-30s, broken down by gender. For the most part, it follows the path carved by the wider electorate. The left’s lead among young voters soars in the early 2000s, as New Zealanders as a whole flock to Helen Clark’s Labour; it falls again when the country becomes captivated by John Key, then rises once more as Jacindamania takes over. Last year’s dip just reflects the generalised, and perhaps temporary, dissatisfaction with Labour. Already the young female vote has rebounded to within its normal range; the young male vote appears to be following suit.
Across all the data, young men are noticeably more right-wing than their female counterparts. (Similar results are reported by other polling companies, including Curia and Roy Morgan.) At first blush, this seems to reflect divergences detected overseas. The trend is especially stark in the US, where young women are rapidly shifting left: in the last decade, Democrats have increased their lead in that demographic from 26 to 38 points. At the same time, the Democrat lead among young men has fallen, from an already-slim nine points to just five. This divergence seems to be driven by the culture wars: young women are alarmed by rising anti-abortion sentiment on the right, while half of US men under 50 believe feminism “has done more harm than good”.
No such yawning chasm, however, can be detected here. In part, this is because young Kiwi males aren’t shifting right. Talbot Mills has charted the left’s lead among young males, repeating their line from the graph above, against the left’s lead across the whole population. Whereas, before 2004, young men were slightly more right-wing than the country at large, they have for the last two decades been slightly more left-leaning. The culture wars haven’t left Kiwi males untouched – the uber-misogynist Andrew Tate, for instance, has a following here – but the impact on voting appears negligible. If there is any polarisation in the New Zealand electorate, it lies – based on this data – in the contrast between increasingly left-wing younger women and increasingly right-wing older men.
It is not inconceivable, in fact, that New Zealand’s youngest voters could get swept up in a different Western trend: the waning correlation between conservatism and age. Traditionally, voting behaviour seemed to validate the proverb, erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill, that if you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain. Voters typically became more conservative as they aged and acquired wealth they wanted to defend against the taxman.
Recently, though, research by the Financial Times has found British and American millennials bucking that trend. Historically, a typical 35-year-old was already just five percentage points less conservative than the whole-population average, and becoming more conservative over time. People in that age group today, however, are roughly 15 points less conservative than the average – and showing no signs of shifting right. This makes them, the Financial Times declared, “by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history”. And, given what four decades of economic conservatism has bequeathed them – gaping inequalities, runaway climate change, insecure jobs and homes – no-one should have expected anything else.