As I’m getting round to writing this way after everyone else, there’s not a lot left to say (which is good as I should be cooking my dinner). If you want an indepth analysis of how badly wrong the Yes campaign want then Liberal vision has it covered:
“In any two horse political race, it is damned near impossible to poll less than 40% of the vote. You have to be spectacularly inept or obscenely unpopular to drop below this figure. For example, no Republican or Democrat Presidential candidate in recent US history has fallen this far. Even Barry Goldwater, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis – all famous for being electorally destroyed – managed to outscore the woeful YES percentage handsomely.”
From the thank you letter from the “Yes2AV” campaign I rather hope that they’re reasonably goods at logic as it starts:
“The votes from yesterday’s referendum have not yet been fully counted and verified, but it is clear that sadly the country has voted in favour of keeping First Past the Post.”
and ends:
“Everyone involved in Yes to Fairer Votes understands that change comes, but you have to want it – and fight for it.”
So I’d assume that the conclusion they’ve reached is that people don’t want AV, or possibly even change at all.
As Long Rider observes, some supporters of the yes campaign have gone from “how dare the No2AV people claim the electorate are stupid” to “the electorate are too stupid to understand” in the time it took to count the votes. But then as Mark Thomas observes in a referendum campaign there’s no penalty for either side in lying about everything- though it may just be that people are so angry with the LibDems that anything they support will fail. The only glimmer of hope for actually reforming our political system, which I think does need doing is that “71 per cent of the electorate do not actively support FPTP” so they may yet still support real reform.
