The final turn in the polls has looked good for the Remain camp. Last night two polls (YouGov and ComRes) showed Remain ahead (51–49, 54–46 respectively), something that gave the pound a boost on international markets. Now, the Evening Standard’s Ipsos Mori survey shows a 52–48 percent lead for Remain:
The four-point gap is nail-bitingly close — especially with heavy rain threatening to dampen turnout in London which is a key target area for Remain.
This was a telephone poll. Those tend to lean Remain.
Rule of thumb: The higher the turnout, the higher the chance that Remain will win. Turnout in the last general election was around 65 percent. By all accounts the Brexiteers are more determined to vote, giving them an edge if the turnout is low.
Voting comes to a halt at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time (10:00 p.m. local). There will be no formal exit polls, although Sky will have a last-minute poll (based on online polling taken yesterday evening), which will be released at that time. Online polls have been more Leave-friendly.
For those wanting to “read” the results as they come out through the night, there’s an excellent guide from Open Europe here.
My prediction? Going into the campaign, I thought that Remain, propped up by a “Project Fear” designed to play on popular anxiety over what life outside the EU might be like, would prevail, with a roughly 55–45 edge. I still expect Remain to win, and for the same reason, but by a narrower margin than that. Full disclosure: My record as a seer is . . . mixed.
NR has a splendid editorial on Brexit here.
Read the whole thing (of course!), but focus most, perhaps, on this:
The EU is a mechanism that enables the political and other elites in Britain to escape from the constraints of democracy. It removes power from institutions subject to the voters in elections, such as the House of Commons, and vests it increasingly in courts and bureaucracies in Brussels that are effectively free of democratic control and even of democratic oversight. As a result, the EU is seductively appealing to those who want to exercise power and who believe they would do so more responsibly and successfully if they did not have to account for their decisions to . . . well, ordinary people like their relatives.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill notes how Cameron’s Project Fear has been supplemented by Project Sneer:
The most striking thing about the referendum campaign has been the sneering of politicians and the opinion-forming set at oiks who are thinking of voting leave. We’ve heard a lot about the coarseness of Ukip’s campaigning on immigration, but that pales into insignificance compared with liberals’ derision for the little people. . . .
Across the media there has been an ugly chuckling at the know-nothing electorate. I’ve never been more ashamed of being a journalist as I have over the past few weeks. Every poll showing that people don’t know all the facts about the EU is held up as evidence of what a folly it was to ask them to vote on it. The public is “wrong about nearly everything”, chortled the Independent. Yet I bet none of these media Remainers could name a single one of the 28 commissioners on the EC. Thickos.
So Project Sneer expresses a class-tinged contempt. It’s an elitist howl of frustration . . . against the idiot public.
NR argues that the Remain campaign reflects “the interests and values of post-national, post-democratic elites:
Once we step outside the moral universe of these elites, however, there is no case whatever for Britain to surrender its self-governing democracy to Brussels.
No there is not.
Project Sneer, of course, insists that Brexit would only be about the past, a hideous/dreary/divisive/fearful (insert disdainful adjective of choice) exercise in nutty, and sometimes nasty, nostalgia, that’s all. And, to be sure, respect for history, tradition and continuity, for what previous generations have built, is there in the Brexit campaign. And so it should be. A friend tells me about neighbors of his, two former soldiers and their wives (all in their 90s) determined to cast their vote today, to do — in that splendid phrase — “their bit,” one last time. Those who would jeer, who would sneer, at that, well . . .
But opting for Brexit is about the future too, about looking beyond the issues of the day — however important they may be — and giving the right answer to the question that for this generation, and for any generation, matters more than any other: Who decides?
I hope my prediction is wrong.
Brexit : Decision Day