The election revealed a deep division between Remainers and Leavers, but 2024 could split the country another way entirely It may be be a different issue- crime, perhaps, or human rights – but that divide between different values will endure long after Brexit

What do the numbers 28,867, 34,559, and 27,445 have in common? They are the number of people who, in the last election, ticked a box marked “Liberal Democrat – To Stop Brexit” in St Albans, Richmond Park, and Winchester respectively – enough to elect Daisy Cooper and Sarah Olney as Liberal Democrat MPs in the first two constituencies, but not enough to unseat Steve Brine in the last.

The headline results of the election were, from a Liberal Democrat perspective, an unmitigated disaster – they lost seats on 2017, their worst performance- in terms of votes cast- in the party’s history, including that of their leader, Jo Swinson, and as a result of their failure to deny the Conservatives a majority, we will leave the European Union, the greatest defeat for liberalism in a century.

Yet behind the scenes, there are reasons for cheer for the United Kingdom’s third party. In 2017 they finished second in just 37 seats – now there are many more seats than they can could plausibly target and win at the next election. While there were far too few seats like St Albans and Richmond Park, there were plenty more like Winchester, where they came tantalisingly close to victory.

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There’s just one problem: will those 90,871 people vote Liberal Democrat again? They – and more than three million other people – voted to stop Brexit, and now it won’t be. Will they stick with their new party – or return to their old one? The Conservatives have the opposite problem – in the 55 seats they won from Labour, people voted for Brexit to happen. And while our politics will continue to be defined by Brexit for decades, by 2024, we will have formally left the European Union – and on that metric at least, Brexit will be “over”. Will Conservative voters in those 55 seats keep up the habit and vote Tory next time? Or will they revert to their old habits and back Labour – or simply not vote at all?

The Conservative dream is that their new pro-Leave voters keep up the habit in 2024, and the old Remain voters they lost to the Liberal Democrats slink back, defeated, to their former party. That would not only allow them to take back the seats they lost to the Liberal Democrats in 2019 and 2017, but would also let them make further in-roads into Labour territory: without gaining a single extra vote from Labour directly.

It would also have important implications for government policy, too: to win this election, the Conservatives have shifted their policy platform on a variety of issues. They’ve signed up to a series of promises on tax-and-spend that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to reconcile with one another. And they’ve moved decisively away from thirty years of economic liberalism, which whatever you think of its overall impact on the country, worked pretty well for Tory voters.

If their old Remain voters forgive and forget, then the Conservative party doesn’t have to worry so much about reconciling their vows to increase public spending, reduce government debt and keep income tax, value added tax and national insurance flat or falling.

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The nightmare scenario is that Leave voters revert to their pre-referendum voting habits – but Remainers continue to reject a pro-Brexit government. This would also get them out of the mess of impossible promises they made in 2019 – but in a way they’d find less enjoyable, because they’d be out of office.

In between those two extremes is a result the Conservative party could live with: in which Leave voters in 2024 vote the same way they did in 2019, and Remain voters keep up their voting habits too. Those three possible futures could end up defining the United Kingdom’s 21st Century – but we don’t know which one will hold together.

One of the reasons why so many opinion pollsters were privately licking their lips at the thought of another referendum on EU membership is because the referendum highlighted divides that we all knew existed – but struggled to precisely define.

Remember that for pollsters, their work on general elections is basically just advertising: for the lucrative contracts with big companies that pays the bills the rest of the time. Most products, when you think about it, are being marketed to Remainers or Leavers. Some companies cater almost exclusively to one side or another – others, like most supermarkets, have brand ranges for Remainers and other ranges for Leavers.

Most successful reality TV shows are, when you think about it, about putting together Remainers and Leavers with hilarious consequences: the programme Wife Swap, in which the mother of the household traded places every week, went off the air in 2010 but every episode essentially puts a Leave family and a Remain family in each other’s shoes. In 2017 Wife Swap went overtly Leave vs Remain when it came back for a one-off Brexit special (‘Can families who are polarised by Brexit find any common ground?’. Come Dine With Me is a programme in which Leavers and Remainers clash with hilarious consequences. Gogglebox is a show in which Leavers watch Remainers – and vice versa.

Pollsters and marketers knew about this divide but struggled to define it, giving it all sorts of naff names like “Tote Bag Milennials” “National Security Pensioners” and “Global Green Community” – I made two of these up, but you get the picture. While the Remain/Leave divide is not perfect either, it highlighted rather than created a new divide in politics.

It may be driven by a different issue in 2024 – crime, perhaps, or human rights – but that divide between different values will endure long after we’ve left. The big unknown is whether it continues to drive votes – or just inspires good reality TV shows.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman