...well, sort of.
Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.
Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.
I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.
So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave
The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.
It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.
In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.
Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.
Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.
I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.
So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave
The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.
It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.
In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.
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| "Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?" |
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