How significant are retired voters?

When teaching voting behaviour recently (it's my favourite topic), I was talking to pupils about how to counter-argue and get marks for analysis. One really interesting area for that is that of class and its apparent declining influence in UK politics. The famous Pulzer quote was that "class is the basis of all British party politics". Yet, by 2017 and 2019 we were looking at a Conservative Party that was able to be highly successful with working class voters, and 2019's statistics in fact showed that the Tories were more successful with C2DE voters (i.e. those with less education or training) than they were with ABC1, which is a dramatic turnaround from even a few elections ago.

But one thing that may give us further food for thought on this is the information regarding voting by wealth and retirement status. It is clear that age clearly has a huge impact, but one thing that surprised me is how much. As you can see in the below diagram, every single income group other than the very poorest are more likely to vote Conservative if we include people who have retired.

However, if we exclude retirees, the picture is dramatically different. All voter groups earning under £100,000 a year are more likely to vote Labour. We might well expect those earning over 100k to be more pro-Conservative, but the fact that most who were even very wealthy by most standards, in brackets such as £70,000 to £99,999 was very surprising to me.

The Conservative lead amongst retired voters clearly gave them a major edge in 2019. It is worth remembering that the turnout amongst 65+ voters was 74%, with younger voters being considerably below this. It would be very interesting to see if the age at which people become more likely to vote Conservative goes up significantly in our next election.