About a year ago, when Holly Cairns became leader of the Social Democrats, I wrote on these pages in an article titled “Is Hollymentum real?” that she and her party had a real and genuine chance of making a significant electoral breakthrough. In the aftermath of her first televised leader’s speech on Saturday night, it’s worth revisiting what I wrote at the time:
Cairns is – ironically enough – of the same generation of Leo Varadkar, but they do not appeal to the same voters. But she offers a generational change in leadership on the left. Across the democratic world, the left increasingly depends on the votes of the young to get ahead – most especially the votes of young unmarried women. In the most recent US election, for example, Democrats won the votes of single women by a margin of 68% to 31% while losing the national vote overall.
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