Although most polls showed roughly equal numbers voting for each side, very different results emerged when the Independent newspaper asked people how the results would make them feel. Forty-four percent said they would be "delighted" with a Leave vote and only 28 percent would be delighted with Remain. Only 33 percent said they would be "disappointed" with an exit from the EU, versus 44 percent who said they would be disappointed staying in. The referendum resembled many such mimetic phenomena in which a people tries to work up its gumption against its elites. It is possible that two-thirds of the country wanted to leave the EU. They just didn't know whether they had elites' permission to want it.Passion counts for so much in relative turnout. Talk is cheap.
Brexit poll fail
You do have to wonder how all the smart people could keep getting so gobsmacked by popular votes:
Deeds, not words!
ReplyDelete"Gobsmacked" ...
ReplyDeleteI'm angry about the media coverage both in the US and UK taking this tone. The sample polling data always has indicated the results would be close. The actual results indicate a preference of a few percent. We're were and are talking about a very nearly 50/50 proposition, to be tested one time. A flip of a coin. Red or Black on the wheel, odds or evens on the dice.
As innumerate as journalists are, I find it difficult to imagine the headlines that would follow should a toss of a coin be used to resolve some other 50/50 issue.
As if: "STUNNING FALL -- Analysts on six continents confessed to gobsmackery and flabbergastihood today, following last night's "HEADS" results from the London coin toss. 'Nobody serious has ever foreseen such an outcome', Professor Hedupisass told a crowd of reporters at the scene, "and no one has considered the contingency plans necessary to cope with this disaster." The fall of the two-sided coin to reveal the Queen's portrait -- rather than the long-anticpated rose, leek, thistle and shamrock of the obverse -- stunned both sides of the question. In fact, earlier yesterday, Chamberlain FaLarge of the HEADS faction confessed directly to this reporter that he would be disappointed but completely un-surprised by a TAILS results. "The toss will be whatever it will be," FaLarge philosophized, "And we are all committed to respecting the result." The chamberlain's phlegmatic demeanor dropped an instant after the coin itself fell, and he and jubilant allies raised a cheer of defiant 'Hurrahs' that continued and echoed through the night and into the morning. 'HEADS, HEADS, HEADS' chanted the old, the white, the underemployed, and the deeply religious. This, of course, worried officials and less privileged tossers who had been secure in the, now-disappointed, expectation that TAILS would remain the posture of at least the foreseeable decade. Now the silent, sober, and sane half of the nation contemplate the devastation, disaster and demographic decimation certain to follow their epic defeat..."
I mean, really? This is the tone and slant to bring to a close election?
It must be as if a farmer's livestock all got up and started having a reasonable discussion about how the farmer should do his work.
ReplyDeleteEven the most experienced livestock farmer would be shocked and unnerved by seeing such. The EU crats, almost certainly.