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How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign
On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss.
Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled.
Earlier that week, the top Tories fronting the leave campaign – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – had dominated the news with promises to control the nation’s borders. The remain side’s message, that Brexit entailed deadly economic risk, was being drowned out, particularly in areas that traditionally supported Labour. Polls showed that many voters were unaware that a remain vote was the party’s official position, a confusion exacerbated by Jeremy Corbyn’s manifest ambivalence about the entire European project.
The vote was less than two weeks away, and the team of former political enemies needed to jump-start the stalled campaign machine. Straw was a former Labour parliamentary candidate. Stronger In’s head of strategy, Ryan Coetzee, had run the Liberal Democrat 2015 election campaign. They were joined by three Conservatives: Ameet Gill, director of strategy at No 10 Downing Street, Stephen Gilbert, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, and Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s communications chief.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign
Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled.
Earlier that week, the top Tories fronting the leave campaign – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – had dominated the news with promises to control the nation’s borders. The remain side’s message, that Brexit entailed deadly economic risk, was being drowned out, particularly in areas that traditionally supported Labour. Polls showed that many voters were unaware that a remain vote was the party’s official position, a confusion exacerbated by Jeremy Corbyn’s manifest ambivalence about the entire European project.
The vote was less than two weeks away, and the team of former political enemies needed to jump-start the stalled campaign machine. Straw was a former Labour parliamentary candidate. Stronger In’s head of strategy, Ryan Coetzee, had run the Liberal Democrat 2015 election campaign. They were joined by three Conservatives: Ameet Gill, director of strategy at No 10 Downing Street, Stephen Gilbert, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, and Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s communications chief.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign
The winners usually get to write history, but at the moment it looks like some of the losers in the UK's EU referendum are getting to do so, in pursuit of their own agendas.
There'll be other accounts and analyses of the dysfunction in the Remain campaign and how we got to where we are now - whole books, for sure - but this is one of the most comprehensive I've seen so far.
What lessons there are for the current US electoral campaign from events in such a different political context, I'm not sure, but some folks seem keen to draw them anyway, so it may serve as food for thought.