|
Behind the scenes of the flawed campaign to keep the UK in the EU
Long but worthy article. The last paragraphs are the BLUF:Could we ever have won the referendum? We lost by a serious margin. Outside of London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, every major region in the country voted to leave the EU. A recent analysis by the London School of Economics suggests that once methodological artifacts are controlled, Leave was almost certainly ahead of Remain during the entire last month of the campaign — and maybe during all of 2016. At the same time the margin of victory was not so large as to in hindsight appear completely unbridgeable. To be sure, it would certainly have been extraordinary if we did win. Britain has a long history of Euroskepticism, and these are populist times, in which voters are ready to reject the status quo. It also has to be said that we faced an extraordinarily hostile media. Team Cameron was used to having the main broadsheets and key tabloids on its side. We weren’t used to a campaign where we could land next to nothing in the newspapers because of their Euroskeptic viewpoints and had to contend with a BBC position on impartiality that was bordering on the absurd. We kept trying to win the 6 and 10 o’clock news with big stories but with little success. Winning would have required a much greater effort, much earlier on, to sway the electorate. One more attack on Boris Johnson, or another speech by Cameron would not have been enough. There were loads of things in hindsight that we should have done — such as deploy Ruth Davidson and Sadiq Khan much earlier or have gotten Cameron out on the road earlier — but I doubt they would have been critical. And while all of Cooper’s focus groups said it was a head (economics) vs heart (immigration) contest, it was a mistake not to attempt to engage emotionally. We may never have been able to win those arguments but we should not have vacated the ground entirely. But our biggest mistake was our failure to deliver the kind of deal we — and especially the media — had given the impression was possible. From the moment Cameron promised a referendum we should have built up the case for European cooperation, preparing the electoral battlefield we would eventually have to fight on. We didn’t. And so a better organized, more passionate adversary won. Posted by: Pappy 2016-10-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=470803 |