The number of Gen Z women who say they would vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has nearly doubled in a month, an aggregate of polls in May claims to have found.
Surveys from the More in Common polling firm in May found that a staggering 21 per cent of women aged between 18 and 26 said they would vote for Reform UK in May, POLITICO reports. This is a nine-point increase over the 12 per cent who said they would do so in April.
Support from Gen-Z female voters has been the one most elusive for Farage’s Reform, yet as the party rises in the polls in general, it appears to be making sudden headway among young women. While Reform was polling second place among Generation Z men in both April and May, it rose from last place to third for women during the same time.
A spokesman for the pollster said: “In the general election, you could confidently say the median Reform voter is a middle-aged man who voted for Brexit… The gender gap is narrowing, but also that age distribution is spreading out… the increase is probably part of a wider expansion of Reform’s support following the election.”
The polling firm, which interviewed 9,000 adults in four polls through May, noted that young women have a very different set of priorities from the general population. Overall, they care considerably less about immigration and border control, while caring the most about the cost of living and affordable housing.
Whether the surging support for Farage among young women will continue this month is yet to be seen, but a new set of policies announced at the end of May by the party, meant to help young families, could help propel it further in subsequent polls. Last week, Farage offered to reform the tax system to prevent the hollowing-out of family formation by double-taxing household incomes.
As reported:
…the proposal would rectify a long-known subject of collective, performative blindness by the British political class: that the tax system either by fault or feature punishes traditional family structures.
Under the present system, a family with two earning adults pays considerably less income taxes than another family earning the same headline amount but with only one working adult, because married couples can’t pool tax-free allowances and bands. Declaring his party for “family, community, and country”, Farage said of his new tax policy: “we want to go much, much further to encourage people to have children, to make it easier for them to have children”.
This would mean, he said: “…a transferrable tax allowance between married people… I know many will say marriage is outdated… the evidence is there to prove it, where people who are married stay together for the longest period of time, the children that grow up in those environments have the best chance of success in life.”
Of levelling the playing-field between single income families and dual income families by allowing couples to pool their tax-free allowance and tax-bands, Farage said: “this transferrable tax allowance, perhaps making marriage just that little bit more important in terms of the family, I do believe it is the right thing to do.”
Mr Farage himself has recently hailed the rise in support for his movement from the youngest voters. Speaking last summer, he remarked “this is fascinating… Generation Z, ‘Gen-Z’, the 15-25s, something remarkable is happening, I mean truly remarkable is happening. And our support in that age bracket, is rapidly going up. The followings I’ve built up on TikTok, Instagram is amazing.”
Identifying a reaction to left-wing dogma in schools and universities as being in part behind the turn, he continued: “There’s an awakening in the younger generation who’ve had enough of being dictated to. Enough of being lectured to, and they’re seeing through the ‘B.S.’ they’re getting at schools and universities.”
Read the full article here
