Why? No one knows what box they put their cross in when they vote.
That's why I said pretend to themselves. We all know that the tories are the nasty party, but when their stated aims are made to sound reasonable, it's easier to back them and hope that the stories are just made-up lefty fearmongering. Trying not to engage with politics between elections, and blame the choices of others when you see things falling apart. With the current crop of MPs, their nastiness is on full show. Some people are fine with that, unfortunately. But we've all met tory voters who do so mainly because they think labour are only about free stuff for someone else. They don't actually hate all foreigners or minority groups, or want all criminals to be hanged in the square. Or destroy the NHS, or education, or libraries, or public transport, or the rivers, or the beaches, or the roads, or ... sorry got distracted for a moment. The point is, for some of the people who voted tory in the past, their actual politics are nowhere near the nastiness of the current UKIPTories. Even if it's always been bubbling away under the surface, the tories have always had a veneer of respectability and have been the main party for the last century. So voting for them could not really be considered fringe, or extreme. Now though, it certainly should be by anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention.