I have voted in every election I have been eligible for. And every time, I walk away with the same feeling: duty, frustration, and a quiet hope that something might actually shift. It never quite does.
There is a story that gets repeated every cycle. Young people do not care. We are distracted. But the young people I know care deeply about housing, the NHS, and what kind of future we are actually being handed. We just grew up watching politics become a performance where destroying the other side matters more than winning the argument. That is polarisation, and it is exhausting to live inside of.
We are not turning away from politics. We are turning away from the version of it being offered to us.
What makes it worse is that we are not even one electorate anymore. Look past the headline results and you find several different groups, each with their own reality, all using the same ballot box.
Take the age gap. My generation is the first expected to be worse off than our parents. We are renting into our thirties, watching home ownership quietly become a fantasy, being told to work harder by people who bought a house on a single income in 1987. So yes, we vote differently. Not out of idealism but because our material reality is pulling us somewhere else entirely.
Then there is the gender divide, which has become one of the most significant shifts in modern politics and one of the least discussed. Young women are moving left.
Young men, in many countries, are moving right, shaped in part by a wave of political content online that speaks directly to them in ways mainstream parties simply have not. We are only beginning to understand what that means long term.
Race adds another layer. Communities once treated as monolithic voting blocs are fragmenting along class, age, and geography in ways pollsters consistently underestimate. No community votes as one, and the sooner politics stops treating them that way, the better chance it has of actually speaking to people’s real lives.
What ties all of this together is simple: polarisation is not just left versus right anymore. It is people living genuinely different lives and drawing genuinely different conclusions from them.
Liverpool was not part of today’s elections, so I did not vote. But I will when I can, not because the system feels perfect, but because walking away does not make it better. What I want is for politics to meet us where we actually are. We are paying attention. It is time it did the same.
