The economically insecure voters behind the 2024 election outcome

For most voters, the 2024 general election will focus on economic concerns. This suggests that income inequality might re-appear as an important explanation of voters’ behaviour, as it has so often been in the past. In this comment we show there is a feature of modern life that will play a more important role in the voters’ electoral calculus: economic insecurity.

Economic insecurity affects a larger group in Britain today than the proportion in poverty. Those who feel economically insecure, some 39% of the electorate, equivalent to 18.5 million potential voters, are a key group determining the outcome of the election, and are especially prevalent among the working-age population. 

Labour has been more successful in picking-up support from insecure voters who opted in 2019 for the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives, or chose not to vote at all, than in attracting their more economically secure counterparts. Among working-age people who voted Conservative in 2019 but no longer intend to do so, Labour and Reform UK have both made crucial gains; however, Reform UK have picked up the lion’s share of insecure defectors of retirement-age.

Economic insecurity also predicts being still undecided among former 2019 Conservative voters, making insecurity even more crucial in this particular election. There is, then, a challenge for both parties to find ways to improve people’s economic security, beyond focusing on household incomes. For the Conservatives, it is about winning back support. For Labour, it is about meeting the needs of its electoral coalition.

The 39% who feel economically insecure provide a large electoral constituency for policies that address financial concerns, such as those concerning cost of living pressures and fears of not making ends meet which flow from them. This is a far larger group than just those who are in poverty. It thus provides a larger constituency for policy appeals to address insecurity, and will likely provide a key test of any incoming government’s ongoing support. In real terms, this 39% of the electorate in Britain are equivalent to roughly 18.5 million potential voters in the election.¹ 

Insecurity is much more than just income

A great deal of government policy is focused on people’s incomes, through cutting levels of taxation, maintaining or safe-guarding pensions, providing benefits, or through job creation and wages. This is not providing a solution to large numbers of people’s feelings of insecurity. The relationship of a person’s personal household income level and their feelings of insecurity is actually quite modest. 

Figure 2 shows the relationship between feelings of economic insecurity and a person’s position on the income distribution, from the bottom 10% of earners to the top 10%.² There is more insecurity among those with the lowest incomes, and less insecurity among those with the highest incomes, but this relationship is very far from a perfect correspondence. Over 1 in 8 of those with the lowest incomes feel secure, and more than 20% of those with the highest incomes feel insecure. Among the middle category, those who feel neither secure nor insecure, there is no relationship to income. Clearly, insecurity is a product of far more than just one’s current earnings. 

The imperfect relationship between income and a sense of security holds up even when we focus directly on those of working age (18-65), which we show below, in Figure 3. Amongst the top 10% of working-age income earners, 1 in 4 feel economically insecure, with that number reaching 1 in 3 amongst those of the relatively high earning 8th and 9th deciles.

The relationship between income and security seems somewhat stronger for those of retirement age (Figure 3b), although it should be noted that there are relatively few retirement-age adults in the 9th (7%) and 10th (4%) income deciles to begin with. However, even among those of retirement-age, there is still a non-negligible amount of ‘secure low earners’ and ‘insecure high earners’ and, as we discuss below, overall there are fewer retirees who feel economically insecure compared to those of working age.

Figure 4 clarifies that not having a low income is neither sufficient nor necessary for economic security,  by highlighting 4 key groups of people: those who do and do not feel insecure, and those who are, and are not, in the lower income group.

Here we have combined those who, in Figure 1, felt ‘secure’, ‘neither secure nor insecure’ and the small group who didn’t know their level of security into a ‘not economically insecure’ segment, and contrast this against the group who felt ‘insecure’ (7+/10 for worry). We then similarly categorised income, taking all those in the bottom tercile (33%) of income earning households as our ‘lower income group’ and all others as their ‘not lower income’ counterparts.

We see here 2 critical groups; those in the lower income group who do not feel insecure (17% of our sample), and the group who do not have lower incomes but who nevertheless feel economically insecure (22%). Greater insight into what differentiates insecurity from income can be gained from comparing those who do not have the lower incomes yet still feel insecure from those who do have lower incomes, but do not feel insecure (17%).

The insecure, but not in the lowest (third) of incomes

Among the 22% who feel insecure, yet do not have the lower incomes we might expect to define this group, we see evidence for the crucial influence of pre-committed expenditures that are difficult to adjust in the short-term (for example, in response to economic shocks).

There is an over-representation of those in the private rental sector (31% of whom fall into this group) as well as mortgage holders (32%), especially those on a variable rate or with less than a year left on a fixed-rate (35%). Similarly, those with non-mortgage debts (28%) and childcare responsibilities (28%) are over-represented in this group, as are Londoners (29%), which could reflect the generally higher cost of living in the nation’s capital.

 Those of prime working age (25-65) are also over-represented in this group (25%), with representation being much lower among younger adults (19%) and those of retirement age (13%). This could reflect the role of future prospects in buttressing the security of the very young (many of whom will still be in full-time education), and the steady and reliable incomes provided by pensions among those in retirement.

Finally, we see a clear role for household savings, with those in the bottom-quartile of our sample in terms of cash savings (those having roughly under £500) being significantly over-represented in the ‘not low income but insecure’ group (25%) compared to those in the top quartile, those with over £50,000 of savings (15%).⁴

The secure, in the lowest (third) of incomes

Fewer committed expenditures, as well as state assistance and greater wealth buffers (such as savings) help explain the 1 in 6 (17%) of our sample who are ‘lower income but not economically insecure’. Amongst this group, there is a clear over-representation of those who own their home outright (20%) as well as those in social or subsidised housing (28%).

Those with no debts (excluding mortgages) are also disproportionately concentrated in this group (22%), as are both those of retirement age (24%) and those under 25 (21%), possibly for the same reasons discussed before.

Economic insecurity and Labour gains

More importantly, we can also see that economic insecurity underpins the gains that Labour have made from the 2019 General Election to our survey at the end of March 2024. Figure 6a shows, among those that are both economically secure and insecure, the percentage of 2019-era Labour supporters that the party have held on to (in grey), rather than lost to rival parties, abstention or undecided, as well as the percentage of those that supported rival parties in 2019 (or did not vote at all) that they have gained.

While Labour successfully retained almost 7 in 10 of both their secure and insecure supporters from the previous election⁵, they have clearly been more successful at picking-up insecure voters that did not back them last time than secure ones. Labour gained the support of 1 in 5 of the former group, but only around 1 in 7 of the latter.

Figure 6b then shows the percentages of 2019-era supporters of the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and other parties, as well as non-voters in that election, that Labour had gained by Spring 2024, and whether that differs by economic insecurity.  We can see clear evidence that insecurity matters.  Labour gained 8% of 2019-era Conservative supporters and 31% of 2019-era Liberal Democrat supporters that currently feel economically secure. However, they gained 13% of insecure 2019-era Conservatives and 37% of insecure Liberal Democrats.

The difference is also very striking looking at abstainers. Labour gained the support of 15% of those who did not vote in 2019 (including those who were ineligible) but feel economically secure, but 1 in 4 previous non-voters who feel insecure.

In fact, when we consider all of the supporters that Labour have gained since 2019, from all sources, we find that 42% feel economically insecure versus only 21% feeling secure (which compares to 39% and 24% of the population in general, and 36% and 26% of those not supporting Labour). In summary, voters are returning to Labour, or voting for the first time because of fears about insecurity.

Economic insecurity and Conservative losses

In Figure 7, we look at those people who voted Conservative in 2019, and for whom they intended to vote, if at all, by the end of March 2024. We include Liberal Democrats under ‘other’ due to the very small numbers (less than 3%) switching from Conservative to Liberal Democrat. We provide data separately for those 2019-era Conservatives who currently feel secure, insecure and neither. Loyalty to the Conservatives falls precipitously among those who do not feel economically secure. Almost half of ‘secure’ 2019-era Conservatives have stayed with the Conservatives, but only 28% of those who felt economically insecure have done so.

Overall, more 2019 Conservatives are moving to Reform UK, but among those who feel economically insecure, the percent intending to vote Reform UK was as high as a quarter (26%, as opposed to 23% overall, and 19% among the secure). This is also before Nigel Farage boosted Reform’s appeal by standing for them. Labour support among 2019 Conservatives, which is arguably a more difficult switch for those voters who were associated so strongly with Brexit and Boris Johnson in 2019, increases from 8% among the most secure to 13% among the insecure (as opposed to 10% overall).

Finally, we also see that greater insecurity is associated with a greater likelihood of being undecided among 2019-era Conservatives (24%, as opposed to 18% of the secure, or 22% of all 2019-era Conservatives). This could account, in part, for the apparent failure of the Conservative campaign to win these voters’ support if economic insecurity is indicative of a deeper sense of worry that has not been addressed by the campaign.

We note that these relationships, as with the statistics on Labour’s post-2019 gains, are robust to using regression modelling to control for the competing effects of income, age, employment stats, gender, housing tenure, ethnicity, education and region, on vote choice, as well as attitudes to immigration and general self-declared tendency towards anxiety more broadly.