Guardina detects latent wisdom in the voting public

R Behr, this time, projects his fears and discontent on to 'the people' about to vote:

Trying to organise people into leave and remain compartments is a non-starter. The voters will decide what this poll is about

 the public has...sniffed out something unfamiliar about their old parties [not LibDems though] , something pungent, a sweaty kind of mania. There is a new, wild glint about the eyes that provokes unease in the non-aligned citizen.

Here is what Behr learned when he 'tagged along with a candidate', who evidently received quite a bit of inattentiveness:

Anyone who has tried canvassing [not just tagging along then?] on a chilly November afternoon knows that political campaigns are an intrusion of public argument into private lives. [The 2017 election]... was only a year after the referendum, which had felt like pulling teeth. The unravelling of May’s brand began the moment she got greedy and tried to cash in her polling lead. It smelled wrong....The prime minister seemed to think she was entitled to victory, and the electorate reminded her who was boss.

Plugging into the deep knowledge of the people shared by all journalists:

Nigel Farage’s decision to withdraw Brexit party candidates from seats where the Tories are incumbent sends mixed national signals. It authenticates the prime minister as a Eurosceptic ultra, but that reinforces the feeling among ex-Tory remainers that Johnson’s party is dead to them. And without a Brexit party candidate on the ballot, some leavers will default back to a lifelong habit of voting for Labour, sooner than endorse a Conservative.

This has been the stuff of gossip for a while, of course. N Watt even reported it as news on Newsnight which shows how far it had penetrated the Islington zeitgeist. It is not all good news though:

Choreography on the remain side is even messier. Even in the seats where pacts have been agreed between Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru, voters cannot be relied on to take dictation from on high...the notion that Labour and Lib Dems should come to a grand accommodation,... is as old as it is infertile...When Labour activists call for an alliance, what they tend to mean is that the Lib Dems should admit the folly of their existence, shut up and dock with the big red mothership of all political virtue.

the belief that this election is a referendum in disguise, and that voters must be channelled into leave and remain streams before they can be let loose in a polling booth.. isn’t how most people will see things, because it isn’t how general elections work. 

Finally, and with hope leaking at every pore:

There is latent wisdom in the inattentive majority, the ones whose antennae are just starting to crackle with reluctant political engagement. They haven’t decided what the question will be on 12 December, let alone what answer to give.

What a shame that that latent wisdom of crowds was so easily overwhelmed by lies in the 2016 Referendum.