Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1407953
9 NEWS maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 08 SEPTEMBER 2021 Middle-aged Labour. Undecided young Labour is becoming stronger among older workers Labour is maximising its support among 51-65s where Abela enjoys an impressive 49-point advantage over Grech and Labour a 41-point lead over the PN. Compared to July, Labour has increased its support in this category by 10 points while the PN lost 15 points. This suggests that Labour is in synch with the concern of older workers who may have ac- cumulated enough savings to start investing some of their hard-earned monies. Some may even be benefit- ting from the property boom. These voters may also be more inclined to value economic and political stabil- ity. Labour and Abela also enjoy a strong lead among the 36-50s, where Abela enjoys a 22-point lead over Grech. But in this category both Grech and the PN registered limited inroads. While Labour lost 7 points in this category, the PN still has only seen a 2-point increase in support. For the first time, the PN seems to have blocked its haemorrhage and benefits from a small shift Over the past months the PN was still shedding more votes to Labour than the other way round. In July the PN was still losing 6% of its 2017 voters to Labour while only gaining 2% of 2017 Labour voters. In this survey, only 1.2% of PN vot- ers in 2017 would vote Labour in a forthcoming election while 2.2% of PL voters in the same election will now vote PN. This reverses a trend in most surveys since 2009, which saw Labour constantly chipping at the PN's voting base. But while blocking the haemor- rhage is good news for the PN, it is still not making sufficient inroads to close the gap in any substantial way. Moreover while 3.8% of PN vot- ers in 2017 trust Abela more than Grech, only 2.5% of PL voters in the same election trust Grech more than Abela. Abela is substantially more popular than his party The major problem for the PN remains that instead of having its leader one step ahead of the par- ty in winning over trust and support, Grech is actually trailing his own party by a single point. But the differ- ence between the popularity of the party and the lead- er is even more p r o n o u n c e d among 16- 35s, where while 29% will vote PN, only 24% trust Grech over Abela. On the other hand in this age group, while only 30% would vote La- bour, 38% trust Abela. The same pattern can also be noted among tertiary-educat- ed voters: while Grech is 4 points less popular then his party, Abela is 5 points more popular then Labour. This means that Labour has more room for future growth than the PN, since voters who trust Abe- la more then Grech are more likely to vote Labour.