Mick Hartley

Matt Singh looks at possible reasons why Brexit pollsters failed to predict the referendum result:

The U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union came as a surprise to many. It has reignited the debate about the accuracy of polls and forecasts (including mine), and the merits of online versus phone polling. Much of that debate has missed what an analysis of the voting now shows is the central polling error and reason for Brexit: a large cohort of new voters.

In the run-up to the vote, the Number Cruncher Politics Brexit Probability Index, which I had been calculating for Bloomberg, showed a 25 percent chance of the "leave" campaign winning — suggesting the "leave" campaign had a real chance but was hardly a favorite. Prediction markets and bookmakers’ odds indicated a similar likelihood, and all but two of the final polls had put "remain" ahead.

Simple explanations for surprise outcomes are popular, but often wrong. The evidence, for example, does not suggest that people changed their minds at the last moment; in fact, two election day polls showed swings towards the status quo, not away from it….

The missing piece to the puzzle is referendum turnout. At 72 percent, turnout was very high by modern standards. Low turnout was expected to make Brexit more likely, given that Brexit supporters were more enthusiastic and would form a larger proportion of a low turnout. But the high turnout raises a different question: Who were the 2.8 million new voters?…

This suggests that Brexiters won by mobilizing millions of supporters who never normally vote, whereas the "remain" side got almost no net benefit. Any new "remain" voters were offset by others not showing up. What particular aspects of the "leave" campaign (social media exposure or particular messages, for example) mobilized those unlikely voters will certainly be the subject of a great deal of study….

The dynamics of the Brexit vote also matters for our understanding of politics. It has long been an aspiration of politicians, primarily on the left, to engage (or re-engage) non-voters, with little success. This referendum finally got people who had long since given up on politics to vote; people who would no longer vote for anyone or anything, but given the opportunity to vote against something – the establishment – they turned out in their millions.

Also this, from John Lichfield:

Symbolically, it was Durham “wot won it” .The Sunderland result – 61 per cent Leave, 39 per cent Remain – sent sterling into free fall on Brexit night. The country has been in a tail-spin ever since.

Four days after the vote, I found myself in Durham Cathedral, that great Norman-Roman edifice on a rocky bend in the river Wear, 18 miles upstream from Sunderland. I had travelled through England in a French-registered car to attend my daughter’s graduation at the University of Durham.

I found my country – and especially my own north country, solid, dependable and pragmatic – on the verge of a nervous breakdown. On three occasions in five days, I was abused because I was driving a French car. That has only ever happened to me once in my life before. 

The local papers in the North-east carried interviews with Nissan car factory workers in Sunderland who had voted Leave and now feared for their jobs. On several occasions I met people who had voted Leave and regretted it. It was apparent that they not followed the campaign or understood what they were voting for.

One intelligent woman, the mother of another graduate, said she had voted Leave but was horrified to find that the country had agreed with her. Her daughter, who had studied in Europe under an EU Erasmus grant, was furious with her mum. What were her chances of finding a job now?…

I have great sympathy for the many northern and midland towns, my own people, who voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. From conversations last week, it seems to me that this was not simply an anti-migrant vote.

It was a vote against London rather than Brussels: a vote for  “identity” and “control” and “jobs” after decades of being hollowed out by industrial decline  and neglected or patronised by British governments. What had any of that to do with the EU?

The manageress of a pub in Consett, just north of Durham city, said that the “overwhelming” bar-room opinion pre-referendum was “We want to be British again”. After the vote, she said, that the overwhelming opinion was “Oh bugger. We made a mistake. They (the Brexiteers) lied to us.”

After decades of vicious disinformation about the EU in the UK popular media, the result was perhaps inevitable. The Daily Mail said that the campaign was characterised by “vicious animosity, crass hyperbole and risible dishonesty”. In my experience, that describes perfectly the Mail coverage of the EU, not just in the referendum campaign but for the past 30 years.