The Conservatives are gaining confidence daily: you can tell from their amplification of the “red threat” in the final yards of the campaign – a dose of anxiety to galvanise their supporters. If they were genuinely anxious, they wouldn’t be able to show it for fear of looking weak. They have plenty of evidence to support their self-belief – they still have a clear lead in the polls. And, until Monday at least, they have survived a campaign with a “gaffe-prone” leader, which in 2019 is what we call a contemptuous clown spewing out race hate.

They will hear the talk of Labour’s superior ground army with equanimity. In the 2015 election, Ed Miliband’s campaign managed an estimated million contact points on the doorstep, for all the good it did him. There are rumours that Boris Johnson’s camp fears “t’n’t” – turnout and tactical voting.

There is a tendency to write young voters off as a joke constituency: flighty, capricious, put off by a drop of rain

It is true that the get-out-the-vote campaign is superior on Labour’s side, a corollary to the party’s larger activist base. It is true, too, that the polls consistently show a progressive majority in this country that could beat this extreme ethno-nationalist variety of Toryism hands down, if it all voted the same way. But experience knocks the edges off these fears: the right has the overwhelming support of the over-65s, who everyone knows are the best at turning out. In Britain’s rich history of violently unpopular Conservative governments, a maximum of 10% of people have ever managed to vote tactically.

Yet there are some threats they do not seem to have factored in. The most obvious is the youthquake, which is a curious oversight, since it was only two years ago that it happened last. There is a tendency right across the political spectrum to write young voters off as a kind of joke constituency: flighty, capricious, liable to get distracted by a bee or put off by a spot of rain. This is partly down to a misunderstanding of what we mean by “youth” – in the 18 to 24 and 24 to 35 age brackets, the preferences are solid and overwhelming – 3:1 progressive parties to Conservative/Brexit parties.

Something interesting happens when you alter the cutoff ages – if your next age bracket is 30 to 39, as in a recent YouGov poll, that drops to 2:1, a significantly closer ratio but still, in polling terms, conclusive – a 30-point lead for the left over the right. However, when your age bracket is 35 to 44, as in this ICM poll, the Tories are actually one point ahead of Labour. As a political entity, “young” is now any age up to 39. Among the over-40s, opinions are a lot more divided – until you get to 70.

A decade ago the only people who’d call a 39-year-old “young” were mortgage companies trying to mask the perversity of the market by pretending to think anyone other than the middle-aged could afford starter homes. “Young” is not really a demographic any more. It’s a class cohort effect, a networked group all subject to the same economic pressures (stagnant wages, precarious work, insecure housing, intractable debt, negligible savings). As such, it moves much more coherently than one whose allegiance is based on shared cultural references and happenstance.

More than nine million voters were registered in 2019. An estimated 37% of those were duplicates, and approximately two million were changes of address. That leaves four million, the majority of whom are young. Even while various pollsters are happy to predict that they will break 2:1 Labour (which is actually quite a cautious estimate: if they’re young, they turn out and they vote tactically, the Labour share could be higher), they have so far been unwilling to build these voters into their predictions.

It isn’t, I believe, an oversight: it is partly a genuine reluctance to deal with so many hypotheticals at once – building a picture of their impact means assuming how they’ll vote when you don’t have the previous data points of 2017 or 2016, then assuming that people who have never turned out before will. And it is partly, going back to the original point, a sense that these are not serious voters – perhaps because they are not angry enough. Or if they are angry enough, their concerns aren’t “legitimate”.

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This is a baffling prejudice, that anyone under 40 is trivial. It will bite the Conservatives, anyway. You can minimise the importance of certain types of voters in your rhetoric – that’s just naive students, that’s just the metropolitan elite – yet the equal weight given to every vote cannot be bludgeoned with chuntering.

When commentators and broadcasters talk about the two party leaders, they are careful to point out that both men are unpopular to an unprecedented degree. Yet if you want that animated, if you want to hear people describing this hatred, you will hear it only about Jeremy Corbyn. Sceptical Labour MPs, Channel 4 focus groups, even sympathetic door-knockers – all will have stories about the very real animus people have towards the Labour leader, for a huge array of reasons (“I don’t like his friends,” someone said in Birmingham Northfield last week. I thought she meant Hamas; it turned out she was talking about Diane Abbott).

The Conservatives have more disciplined ranks and a more sympathetic media, so this message has been partly obscured, but people loathe Boris Johnson. We’re not on a national spectrum, from finding him “endearing” to “less endearing”. People who don’t buy his schtick absolutely despise the man. The bizarre fact that only ex-Tories – Matthew Parris, Nick Boles, John Major – are prepared to say so does not make this any less salient.

Arguably, even if the Conservatives had noticed any of this, it would be too late to act on it: it appears, fundamentally, that they’ve been convinced by their own rhetoric – that theirs is the only authentic patriotism, the only meaningful anger. Willing it so doesn’t make it true.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist