The European elections don't work as a proxy referendum

Yesterday, a shock Yougov poll came out suggesting Farage's new Brexit Party was set to win a plurality of votes in the European elections. The results suggested a 27% vote share for the Brexit Party, 22% for Labour, 15% for the Conservatives, 10% for the Greens, 9% for the Lib Dems, 7% for UKIP, 6% for Change UK and 4% for SNP and PC. Understandably, there has been a lot of anger about the failure of the unambiguously pro-remain parties to coordinate their efforts. But even if they had done so, the European parliamentary elections were always going to be a very crude indicator of Brexit sentiment, and likely particularly be underwhelming for remain.

This is for two reasons. The first, as Simon Wren Lewis sets out in an article for the New Statesman here, a large number of remain voters are going to vote Labour, and the majority of Labour voters are going to be cast by people who would likely vote remain in a second referendum. Many remain voters also have party loyalty, dislike the three explicitly remain parties for well understood, and very understandable reasons, may have many other priorities and interests other than Brexit, and, as happened in 2017, may even vote Labour for tactical reasons as a way of voicing remain support. Given the margins of any likely referendum, the remain supporting parties would have to win over almost all Labour votes to produce the kind of symbolic victory they might be hoping for in the European elections. That just isn't going to happen. And as long as their attempts to win over some of these votes involve (quite understandably) stressing their differences with Labour over Brexit, it will be even more difficult to claim later that the Labour vote share should be read as read for support for remain, even if some of it should be.*

The second reason has little to do with coordination or interpretation of vote share. Even if it were possible to read off remain and leave support accurately by proxy through the European election results, this would still suffer from the problem that such a vote would only measure abstract attitudes to Brexit. These have shifted in remain's direction, but still dramatically underestimate how remain might fare in a referendum which involved any specific Brexit option. The most recent Yougov polls suggest remain enjoys a 22% lead against ratifying the Withdrawal Act, and a 14% lead over no deal**. Public attitudes towards Brexit in the abstract have always been closely balanced. This was true in 2016 and is true now. The real advantage to remain in a second referendum is not the modest shift in attitudes or demographics since 2016, but the change in what would actually be voted upon. The European elections, in this sense, have the same problem as the 2016 referendum: they don't involve a choice between concrete outcomes, but are instead a measure of general attitudes.

What will matter politically will of course be less straightforward, and is not down to the 'winners' and 'losers' of the European elections, but the perceived impact attitudes to Brexit have had on the vote share of the two main parties. But whatever the effects of the elections happen to be, the one thing they will not do is provide much of a gauge for remain support in a future referendum.


*This is, of course, unless the Labour leadership announces an unambiguous support for a second referendum.

** This figure, while still a very large lead, might give pause for thought over a second referendum, given the consequences of no deal.

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