Will the student vote swing a December election?

There’s talk of a December election – and 12 December is the current date under discussion.

Whether or not you believe that this will actually happen, you can’t fail to spot a developing narrative that suggests that the choice of date overlaps with the end of university term, and that this will be bad news particularly for Labour. Another tactical masterstroke by Classic Dom, and so on.

This theory is currently based on nothing more than supposition. University was an important time in the lives of many of our top politicians and political journalists, but the rosy glow of these halcyon days bears little resemblance to the modern student experience. So Team Wonkhe got our heads down and collected data on the first day of the Christmas holiday for every single major UK university.

When does Christmas start at university?

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What do we see?

There are some university seats with perilously small majorities. Southampton Itchen (Solent University) is a Conservative seat with a majority of just 31, Newcastle-under-Lyme (Keele University) is a Labour seat with a majority of 30. Two Plaid Cymru seats, Arfon (Bangor University) and Ceredigion (Aberystwyth University) have a majority of around 100. All of the above named universities finish on 16 December.

With a fair number of these marginal seats, it is clear that the university vote would have a chance of affecting the result. I’ve included the student and staff FTE of each provider, so you can see a few seats further up the chart that could turn interesting with concerted higher education action, not least Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Brunel University, London) currently held by one Boris Alexander De Pfeffel Johnson.

Here’s a plot that ranks seats by the potential difference between the parliamentary majority and university vote.

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Clearly, this isn’t an exact analysis – we’ve already identified that many students and staff will live in other constituencies… an effect so massive it hardly even matters that I used last year’s FTE data. The other consideration to bear in mind is that the student vote may not break on expected party lines – the remain mood on campus is such that you could imagine this being a more pressing consideration than a baseline left-wing sympathy.

Thanks to Sofia Ropek for her help with data collection.