65% have always voted for the same party

Just under two thirds of the electorate have always voted for the same party in previous elections, MaltaToday’s survey gauging the nation’s election mood shows.

The survey shows that 64.6% of voters have been loyal to the same party, while 29.9% have voted for different parties—a category colloquially referred to as floaters.

Significantly, the current crop of respondents who say they will not vote in the next general election includes a larger share of voters (47.1%) who have always been loyal to their party. This suggests that non-voters are more likely to come from the party grass roots.

Floating voters make up 36.2% of those intending not to vote.

Since the survey also shows that former Labour voters are more represented among current non-voters—the PL loses 13% of its 2022 general election support to abstention compared to just 6% of PN voters—this suggests that Labour is losing both floating voters and traditional Labour voters to abstention.

This may complicate the party’s strategy to win back these two categories of non-voters. The party may need to adopt different approaches to re-engage long-standing Labour supporters than those used to attract former PN voters, who shifted to Labour in 2013, 2017 and 2022.

Crucially, the survey also suggests that despite the great migration of PN voters to Labour in 2013, the PN still includes a larger segment of floating voters in its midst (30.9%).

In contrast, the percentage of floating voters intending to vote PL stands at 20.5%.

This suggests that the PN faces a greater challenge in retaining a broader coalition of voters, while Labour relies on a higher proportion of loyal voters (77.5%). The percentage of loyal voters in the PN stands at 65.9%.

This could also reflect previous historical shifts towards the PN in 1992 when the party won with a 13,000-vote lead, and 2003, which determined Malta’s membership of the EU.

A demographic breakdown of the survey suggests that floating voters peak in the 36–50 age bracket (33.1%) and decrease to 27.5% among voters aged 65 and over.

The largest share of floating voters is found in the Northern district (40.8%), which includes sprawling urban centres such as Mosta and St Paul’s Bay. The second largest share (34.5%) is found in the Labour-leaning South East. In contrast the lowest percentage of floaters is found in Gozo (18.8%) and the Labour-leaning South Harbour region (22.6%), which includes Cottonera.

The survey also shows that party loyalty tends to decrease among more educated voters, with the share of floating voters increasing from between 25% and 26% among voters with a primary or secondary education to between 33% and 35% among those with a higher level of education.