People have made their mind up. The wisdom of crowds is a strange thing. If the crowd get to talk to each other, influence each other, they can make a daft decision. But if you ask a crowd a question and don’t let them compare notes the average of their answers will be close to the truth (see the ‘guess the weight of the pig’ problem).
In 2010 people had made their mind up not to give Labour five more years but hadn’t completely fallen in love with Cameron. A coalition government with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats followed.
In 2015 people were still not completely convinced about Cameron but they had decided there was no point voting Lib Dem if you ended up getting Conservative so the Lib Dem vote collapsed and Cameron got a small majority.
Cameron resigned over Brexit and his successor, Teresa May went to the country for support in 2017. The country, in its wisdom, had no idea who was best equipped to get us out of the mess Brexit had put us in and voted her slim majority away.
By 2019 the wisdom of the crowd was to be utterly fed up of three years of Brexit conversation and gave May’s successor a large majority to get Brexit done, however bad the deal.
Sir John Curtice, the polling guru, says that he has had more limelight than usual this election because the campaign is more or less over. The election has not led the morning news on a number of occasions and polls are being examined in forensic detail to see if there is anything interesting hiding. There isn’t. People have made up their minds and are not, it appears, going to shift.
What made their minds up? Partygate and Trussonomics. These are the things that people mention when asked what has caused them to withdraw support from the Tories.
The wisdom of the crowd is to shut up all opposition voices for five years and let an unopposed government have some space to fix er, everything. They'll need it
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki was published by Doubleday in 2004 and discusses the guess the weight of the pig problem.
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