Is politics down to the great mortgage divide?

Is politics down to the great mortgage divide?

Have the interest rate cuts been behind the Brown bounce?

Starting with the usual caveat about not reading too much into poll subsets there is some quite interesting data from the latest Ipsos-MORI poll linking the tenure of respondents to their voting intention.

From what I can see the firm only started providing this information in November so there is almost nothing we can compare current figures with. But what we see in the panel above is an enormous split between those with mortgages or who pay rent and those who own their own properties outright.

Thus if the voting was just restricted to the owning outright then it would be C53-L33-LD10 enough to give Cameron a massive landslide. Whereas amongst those still paying off their mortgage who have benefited enormously from the interest rate cuts the split C33-L39-LD15 which would produce a three figure majority for Brown.

Clearly the owner outright group has many more older people in it and they generally tend to be more pro-Tory.

One thing that makes the owners without mortgage so much more powerful is that they are disproportionally more likely to vote. Their certainty percentage is 68% compared with 47% for the mortgage payers and just 32% for private renters.

This data will be worth tracking.

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