Who the hell is voting for the Scottish Greens?

Three questions can establish whether someone will vote Green in May’s Scottish Parliament election, and none involve climate change.

A new poll showing the progressive party on course to become the second-largest bloc at Holyrood has caught opponents and commentators unawares, even though a close reading of polling data has been pointing to this outcome for months now.

Cue flustered demands to know who exactly is voting for a party more associated with gender and Gaza than with the environment.

The first thing to understand is that, yes, the Greens are far outside the mainstream on trans ideology — one of their MSPs believes parliament ‘should be exploring’ whether to allow eight year olds to change their sex — but trans ideology is not a major concern for most voters.

As such, countering that ideology by enforcing the Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland or taking other measures to restore women’s sex-based rights is also not a top priority for the median voter. For gender believers and sex realists these issues will play a central role in determining their vote, but neither population is large enough to have more than a marginal impact.

Which brings us back to the three all-important questions, which we’re indexing against regional list voting intentions since the list is where the Greens acquire all of their Holyrood seats.

Question One: Is the voter aged between 16 and mid-thirties? In regional list voting intentions, this demographic, which includes Gen Z and younger millennials, is a straight fight between the Greens and the SNP. No other party comes near.

Question Two: Is the voter educated to at least graduate level? If so, it’s another two-horse race between the Greens and the Nationalists.

Question Three: Is the voter a private renter? Supporters of the Scottish Greens are disproportionately likely to live in the private rented sector. Even SNP voters struggle to match them on this barometer.

If someone answers Yes to all three of those questions, there is a very good chance they are considering or have already decided to vote Green on the regional list on May 7.

From this we can profile the median Scottish Green voter as someone under forty(ish); university educated; a semi-professional or lower-paid professional; private renter; lives in a city or commuter town; broadly progressive in social attitudes and interventionist in economic outlook; would answer to the label ‘socialist’ but in practice is closer to Scandi social democracy; sees politics in terms of absolute moral claims (‘refugees welcome’, ‘trans women are women’).

While many will still be making up their minds on how to vote, the circumstances in which they will decide were set almost twenty years ago, for this is a cohort of electors who have lived most if not all of their adult lives in the shadow of the 2007 global financial crisis and its long-term effects on the Scottish and UK economies.

If they attended university as a Scottish domiciled student, their fees were waived but they probably racked up substantial student loan debt which they are still paying off. They entered a labour market less unionised than that of their parents or grandparents, one in which roles that would previously have been full-time were advertised as part-time or on zero-hours contracts. They earn substantially less than similarly situated workers in comparable economies.

They still can’t afford to buy a home because stagnated wages and prices inflation have polished off much of their ability to save, and even those who manage to put something by every month are nowhere near the ever-rising deposits required. Their parents and grandparents were owner-occupiers in their twenties, some of them having snapped up their council house at a discount, whereas they are in their thirties and still renting.

Their landlord needs to be badgered to fix a broken shower or get someone to look at the mould in the kitchen but is an eager beaver when it comes to hiking up the rent. Because they cannot afford a home, they continue to delay marriage and children, and some are eyeing their biological clock with ever more anxiety. Theirs is a life of professional precarity.

Educated ABC1 voters in their thirties should be voting SNP or, if it wasn’t so hopeless, the Scottish Labour Party. If they were in England, they would have been prime targets for Tory election strategists, even as they called themselves Lib Dems to save face within their social circle. They are Greens not out of envy or entitlement or naïveté or any other epithet thrown at them by people who think it’s still 1987. They are aligning with a party which tells them the political consensus has shafted their generation because the political consensus has indeed shafted their generation.

The intergenerational injustice of a social contract designed by, for and in the interests of baby boomers has, unsurprisingly, stoked much resentment among the millennials left to pay for it. For more than a decade now, policymakers have been warned that failure to remedy the unfairness faced by younger voters would create a readymade electoral bloc for leftist parties and other economic populists. Those warnings were disregarded. Now meet the consequences.

That the Greens are polling well does not mean their fiscal or economic policies are correct. Most of them aren’t, whether the alluring but ultimately self-defeating logic of focusing tax rises on ‘the rich’ or their love affair with rent controls. The kind of egalitarian society the Greens wish to see is unachievable without significant tax increases across income brackets while the counter-productivity of rent controls is a rare subject on which most economists agree.

Yet trying to warn young professionals that voting Green won’t further their interests in the long term would be as effective as telling Leave voters that Brexit will lead to unprecedented increases in immigration. More often than not, democracy is about voting in haste and repenting at leisure.

Instead of throwing up their hands and asking why oh why anyone would vote Green, the party’s opponents might want to reflect on their own efforts to woo the demographic the Greens are appealing to. It sticks in the craw to say it, but so far in this election the Scottish Greens appear to be the only party aware of the existence of voters under forty. Certainly, they are the only party tailoring a message to that age group.

In my view, the growth in their support bodes ill for Scotland’s politics and its economy, but only a fool would be shocked by it. Deny young people the life milestones that nudge people rightwards with age — economic prosperity, home ownership, marriage, parenthood — and of course you’re going to see electoral behaviour that diverges from that of previous generations.

To those in rival parties and past governments wondering what turned a generation of ambitious, educated young people into Green voters, the answer is simple: you did.