Breaking Blue

The Conservatives suffered a once-in-a-century loss at the 2024 general election. Two-thirds of their seats and nearly half their vote share was swept away four and a half years after Boris Johnson’s thumping victory. This catastrophic result cannot be solely blamed on the anti-incumbency wave crashing against governing parties worldwide — the British Conservatives suffered one of the worst declines.

Breaking Blue is Onward’s in-depth analysis of the 2024 election, examining how and why the Conservative Party suffered a particularly devastating defeat. The full comprehensive report in the autumn will provide deeper insight into the result — including the rise and fall of Conservative voting shares since 1997, the changing nature of the Tories’ voting coalition since returning to power in 2010, the impact of the election campaign, the sudden rise of Reform UK and how tactical voting was used. These are the initial findings.

The Conservative Party lost voters in every direction, retaining just half of its 2019 voting coalition. Breaking Blue identifies a crushing four-way pincer movement on age, income, geography, and Brexit vote that decimated the Conservatives at the ballot box. 

• Over a fifth of the party’s few young supporters under 34 backed Labour, while a quarter of 45 to 74-year-olds defected to Reform.
• Defection rates were highest among C2 voters, and 28% went to Reform.
• Conservative defectors in urban areas were more likely to vote Labour, and in rural areas, they backed the Liberal Democrats – but Reform was the most likely harbour in all places.
• Nigel Farage returned. In 2019, 78% of people who voted for Ukip in 2015 and Leave in 2016 backed the Conservatives, but this plummeted to 10% as they returned to Reform.
  

Breaking Blue finds the party’s vote share fall was more severe than other pandemic governments in Germany, New Zealand, and Canada because Conservative competence collapsed.

The Partygate scandal sparked the downward decline, with Liz Truss’s mini-budget driving Conservative support lower. By the time the election was called, the Conservatives were ahead of Labour on all but one negative perception — significantly more out of touch, uncaring, self-serving, incompetent, and untrustworthy than Labour but marginally more patriotic. The election campaign resulted in a bad defeat, turning into a historic and unprecedented loss and tactical voting at an all-time high. 

Where now? The Conservatives’ eventual path to a majority again lies with winning over Labour supporters. But the party is too far behind and too disliked by these voters to win them back immediately.

To get the party off life support, the Conservatives must learn to be a good opposition—ending their recent perceived untrustworthy and chaotic behaviour. It shouldn’t choose between winning back Reform and Liberal Democrat defectors to begin its recovery.

Breaking Blue finds this is a false binary because despite their differences in economic beliefs, Reform and Liberal Democrat defectors are closest to Conservative voters. Nor are Liberal Democrat defectors necessarily “liberal” – a majority (53%) support cutting immigration. Crucially, they are more likely to vote Conservative, and 76% of Reform and 58% of Liberal Democrat defectors dislike Keir Starmer.

These voters are also more demographically aligned to the Conservatives, who are more likely older, working class, Brexit-supporting homeowners, living outside cities and without a degree. These are the cluster of ‘super demographics’ — the indicators of people who abandoned the Conservatives in 2024 in large numbers that led to the devastating “proportional swing”, which reduced the Tory vote the most in places it had traditionally been strongest.