But each state only maintains one electoral register. You register to vote once in the US, and the same register is used for primary elections (in which case voting may be confined to people who have registered a party affiliation) and general elections (where everybody can vote, regardless of whether they have registered a party affiliation or not).
In the general election, even if you have registered a party affiliation, you get the same ballot paper as everybody else and you can vote for a candidate from any party. The ballot is secret so nobody knows if you, a registered Democrat, have voted for the Republican candidate, or vice versa (unless you tell them, of course). But overall figures are known, so that commentators can note that, e.g., although 55% of the voters in such-and-such a state are registered Republicans, the Democratic candidate won the state.
Yes. and there’s no data at all on the UK electoral register which would cast any light on this.
What there are are polls which (a) ask people how they voted, and (b) ask them which party they generally support, and then break down the answers to the first question by the answers given to the second. And the poll conducted by Ashdown has already been referenced and linked in this thread. I don’t know if there are any other polls which provide this information or, if they are, how their results compare with Ashdown’s
What consequences? There’s been a reaction to the result, but that is a short-term issue. Consequences won’t be really known for 5 years or more.
As I’m sure you’re aware, but our American colleagues may not, pretty much the whole Establishment was behind Remain. The Establishment dislikes change. Now we’ve voted to Leave, there will be an adjustment and we’ll move on.
It does not require a pollster to tell us that with Sunderland and Newcastle returning vast numbers of Leave votes that many traditional Labour Party voters did not follow the Party line. Anecdotal evidence from Labour Leave campaigners suggested roughly a third or more Labour voters were for Leave. This number is probably not too far wide of the mark.
Yes, and it correlates fairly closely with what the Ashdown poll is showing.
Which, of course, means that two-thirds of Labour voters, more or less, are for Remain.
So the conundrum for Labour (whether under Corbyn or under a new leader) is this: At the next election. do we take the line that the referndum has settled this question, and the party platform should be to proceed to negotiate Brexit on the best terms that can be had? Or do we go into the next election seeking a mandate to remain in the EU?
Two-thirds of Labour supporters, more or less, were Remainers in the referendum, but it doesn’t follow that they will all want the party to go on flogging what some of them will now see as a dead horse. If the Labour party takes a pro-Remain stance, it will presumably piss off most of the one-third of Labour supporters who are pro-Brexit, and possibly some of the two-thirds who are or were pro-Remain, but feel that this has been played out and now want to move on to other things. To balance that, they’ll hope to pick up support from voters who haven’t been traditional Labour supporters, but who want to contine to fight the good Remain fight and will see Labour as the only major party taking a pro-Remain stance.
Electorally speaking, I wouldn’t think that was a particularly good bet. If I (a) were the Labour leader, and (b) were driven purely by a consideration of what would attract the most votes, I’d want to see compelling evidence of massive buyer’s remorse on the part of the electorate, and a thumping majority in opinion polls (public and private) for “back away from Brexit!” before I would take such a stance.
Causing the dissolution of the nation puts him close to the top? Fucking Hitler couldn’t break up the UK. If Scotland leaves over the EU referendum, David Cameron will hold the twin distinctions of being both the last, and worst, PM the country ever had.
This is a good analysis, but I think the prospects for anti-Brexit Labour are worse even than that.
The 2/3rds of Labour voters figure from the Ashcroft poll defines Labour voters as those who voted Labour in 2015. This was a bad year for Labour when it was widely acknowledged that they’d lost a lot of “traditional” Labour voters - some to the Tories, but a surprising amount to UKIP (and obviously a lot to the SNP, but I’m focusing on England and Wales here). I would guess these lost Labour voters were slightly more likely to vote Leave than those that stuck with them in 2015.
Labour *already *had to win back all those voters. Everywhere in England outside London, and Wales, voted Leave. So even if an anti-Brexit Labour picked up **all **the Remain voters, it would still need to win over Leave voters to win a majority. (I’m ignoring FPTP effects here, but I doubt they overturn these numbers - in fact they might worsen them.) Even a position of “OK, sure, Brexit, but we’ll accept freedom of movement in return for access to the single market” will be going against the wishes of the voters Labour needs to pick up. But if they get into a bidding war with the Tories or UKIP about how few immigrants they want, they’re going to lose.
So Corbyn, by failing to make the case for Remain and winning over traditional Labour voters to it with a massive, high energy campaign, has made Labour’s already poor electoral chances considerably worse. Even if Leave had still won, he would at least have laid the groundwork.
Could you tell me, if you don’t mind, at what point the United Kingdom was effectively bankrupt? I did not hear about this astounding event, when the government of one of the largest economies in the world was unable to pay its debts. Perhaps a link to a news story?
Not to be an ass, but I’m honestly a little confused, as a Canadian, as to the panic over immigration.
According to every reliable sources I can find, total immigration into the UK is sitting around 550,000 a year (down a little from a few years ago.) Of those, anywhere from 10 to 20 percent are already citizens of the United Kingdom. This is offset by the fact that, being an EU member, the UK has a strikingly high number of people leaving - 300,000 a year or so, a very large percentage of whom were originally immigrants.
In percentage terms that doesn’t strike me as being especially high. It’s not exactly an unmanageable flood, that’s for sure. Canada’s total and net immigration is higher than that.
I don’t want to derail the main thread, but this is not generally correct. The state of Washington, for example, does not ask for or maintain any listing of party affiliations. (Personally, I find it absurd that people in other states think that it’s any business of the state to know what political party they prefer.) The only election for which there are separate ballots for parties is presidential primary- all other elections have one primary ballot from which the top two become candidates in the general election. (Also, the Washington Democratic presidential primary is symbolic only, all the electors come from caucuses anyhow.)
I would say there are arguments over the exact figures, given freedom of movement within the UK current immigration figures come from randomly questioning arrivals at airports and ports about their intentions.
The problem is the UK is densely populated and most of that immigration has been to the most densley populated areas, coupled with a real reluctance to build houses (everyone agrees more are needed, but nobody can agree where to build them), some areas the cost of accommodation has soared and other services placed under strain. Now of course the problem is also due to natural population increase (and the lack of a comprehensive housing policy) , immigration serves an important function in the UK economy and by no means are all the immigrants from the EU, but the actual and perceived lack of control over immigration policies by the UK within the EU has been a hot-button issue for many years and was probably the decisive factor in brexit. If you have to sum up why there is so much opposition to immigration in the UK concisely the negative effects are probably more obvious and certainly more well publicized, where as the positive effects (e.g. economic benefits) are more intangible.
Arguably it may’ve also cost Labour the last two general elections too as wrongly or rightly the New Labour government where seen as the architects of increased immigration and subsequently they have been seen as dismissive over immigration concerns or merely playing lip service to these concerns in order to poll better. One of Corbyn’s biggest problems is that on immigration he is seen as even softer than many other potential Labour leaders and given the strength of feeling on the issue that in itself is probably enough to mean that he won’t be able to win a general election.
Someone educate me, Japan isn’t part of an EU style system, neither is South Korea, both are relatively prosperous and developed, why would we be different.
I’m pretty sure it’s generally correct, but it doesn’t apply for all states. And more states are switching to, or considering, open primaries. Looks like it’s up to 20.
How can you have separate ballots in the presidential primary if there’s no record of party? Do you just pick one on the day?
Well, because you already are different. The UK is not Japan and it is not South Korea.
It’s easy to find particular examples of countries not in the EU which are prosperous. It’s also easy to find particular examples of countries not in the EU which are anything but prosperous. Neither, on it’s own, tells us very much about how any of the countries currently in the EU would fair if they were to leave the EU. To get a sense of that, you have to look at the circumstances of, and the options open to, the country you are concerned about, and not some country which is completely differently situated geographically, culturally and economically.
Most of the economic commentary on Brexit suggest that leaving the EU will tend to impoverish the UK. From a pro-Brexit point of view, there’s four possible responses to this:
Accept that it’s true, but argue that it’s a price worth paying to control immigration/regain national sovereignty/whatever.
Accept that it’s true, and seek to minimise the impact by negotiating an EU-like relationship for the UK, but from outside - e.g. continued participation in the single market. This must involve difficult and painful compromises which at least some advocates of this approach are in denial about. (On one view, what scuppered Johnson was his apparent belief that these problems would somehow go away.)
Deny that it’s true, and point to the minority economic opinion which argues that the UK can do well outside the EU. It has to be said that the principle economic commentators who are of this opinion are fairly radical, and SFAIK their model involves the UK having no special trade relationship with the EU, but simply trading on default WTO terms. As far as I’m aware, no significant politician on the “Leave” side is advocating this.
Deny the value, utility or reliability of economic prognostications at all. While this is a useful tool for avoiding having to rebut economic arguments against leaving, it prevents you from predicting that the UK will be economically OK, or better off, as a result of leaving, since that is an economic prognostication which must by definition be valueless, useless and unreliable. So you end up arguing for a leap into the economic unknown, fortified by some vague faith in the Triumph of the Will, or something like that.
There is also a position somewhere between your (2) and (3): Deny that it’s true, but accept that in the short term (like, for maybe ten years) the UK needs to stay in the EEA while we get our shit together. And that probably means freedom of movement, although it’s not totally clear to me that Norway, for example, offers quite the levels of freedom of movement that full EU states do.
For example:
These people are pretty scathing about those who believe that we can go “cold turkey” and just fall back on WTO rules.