Maybe Leave won regardless of or even despite my ideas. Maybe I’m fooling myself like Cameron. Some of my arguments below have as good an empirical support as is possible in politics (i.e. not very good objectively) but most of them do not even have that. Also, it is clear that almost nobody agrees with me about some of my general ideas. It is more likely that I am wrong than 99% of people who work in this field professionally.
He himself warns not to be construed as too influential. In this case the Scott’s caveat apply: elections that are won by slim margin don’t say much of significance.
His argument is that although Leave won by a small majority, it should have lost by a very large majority (for various reasons, particularly that the status quo has an advantage in these things) and that that is the large difference we should be thinking about.
I’m pretty sure that in Trump vs. Clinton, Clinton would have won by a large majority if Trump didn’t campaign. But it would be silly to say “Trump should have lost by a large majority” on that basis.
Saying “one side should have lost because of X” implies that X has outsized effect on one side compared to the other. But telling political stories is, like campaigning, something that both sides do and which they pretty much have to do to have a reasonable chance at winning.
The point is that saying “they wouldn’t have won if they didn’t do X”, in a context where you are trying to say something useful, implies that X is some special thing that was only done by them, not that X is something that everyone does. Nobody says “Trump would have lost if he had failed to breathe”, because everyone running a campaign needs to breathe and saying that you don’t win if you don’t breathe is obvious, trivial, and tells you nothing special about Trump.
And “the pro-Brexit campaign did special things which the anti-Brexit campaign did not also do” has not been well-supported here.
I think it’s fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don’t say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a ‘treatment’ effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.
But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.
He himself warns not to be construed as too influential. In this case the Scott’s caveat apply: elections that are won by slim margin don’t say much of significance.
His argument is that although Leave won by a small majority, it should have lost by a very large majority (for various reasons, particularly that the status quo has an advantage in these things) and that that is the large difference we should be thinking about.
I’m pretty sure that in Trump vs. Clinton, Clinton would have won by a large majority if Trump didn’t campaign. But it would be silly to say “Trump should have lost by a large majority” on that basis.
Saying “one side should have lost because of X” implies that X has outsized effect on one side compared to the other. But telling political stories is, like campaigning, something that both sides do and which they pretty much have to do to have a reasonable chance at winning.
I think the comparison in the case of Cummings and Brexit is to what other pro-leave campaigns would have done, rsther than to no campaign at all.
The point is that saying “they wouldn’t have won if they didn’t do X”, in a context where you are trying to say something useful, implies that X is some special thing that was only done by them, not that X is something that everyone does. Nobody says “Trump would have lost if he had failed to breathe”, because everyone running a campaign needs to breathe and saying that you don’t win if you don’t breathe is obvious, trivial, and tells you nothing special about Trump.
And “the pro-Brexit campaign did special things which the anti-Brexit campaign did not also do” has not been well-supported here.
Well according to the article, he and his team did do special things. Of course you may not believe that, but he presents a plausible narrative.
I wonder what would have happened if Trump had run a very boring, straight-laced campaign though?
I think it’s fair to argue that elections that are won by a slim margin don’t say much of significance about discrete narrative changes in the weeks leading up to the election. That could be false though, if for example we view Trump winning the election as a ‘treatment’ effect, which gives him a new discrete ability to change the narrative.
But more generally, I think an election such as Brexit does give us a significant story, not necessarily for the week leading up to it, but for the changing preferences of a population in the year or two leading up to it and the invocation of the election itself.