Why Cummings Won the Brexit Referendum

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(Edited)

An objective summary of a speech given by Dominic Cummings at Nudgestock 2017, explaining in-depth why his Leave Campaign won the Brexit referendum.

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Summer 2015, a happily unemployed Cummings sat at home sipping on a cold beer and reading, shortly after David Cameron unexpectedly winning the election, when he started to receive phone calls from Tory MPs, campaigners and some of the party's billionaire donors, frustrated they had no credible campaign prepared to market the Brexit referendum. A reluctantly approached Cummings had campaigned 15 years earlier to stop Britain joining the euro, and wasn't too keen on facing down the euro-sceptic scene again. However, sensing there was a chance he could actually pull it off, Dominic couldn't resist a rare opportunity to radically change Britain's "dysfunctional" system.

Up until this point, there hadn't been any Tory Brexit campaign organisation, nor money invested. It was a cause predominantly led by UKIP's Nigel Farage, with little political or public support, only from a few noisy factions, with a lot of infighting and bad blood, even between its Tory supporters. For the initial eight weeks, Cummings with his bike and Iphone, began cycling around London, trying to convince half a dozen "very good people" to quit their jobs and join his high risk start-up. Meanwhile, Cameron is now Prime Minister in Downing Street, with all the structural advantages entailed and Whitehall behind him. In control of re-negotiation, timing, rules, "the whole Tory Party machine", Whitehall machine, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the City, "you name it".

During his market research to gauge the British public's opinion on Brexit, he discovered that the situation remained the same as from his euro campaigning days, and that people were just as clueless about the EU as they had been 15 years earlier. But during that time, according to Cummings, there had been three major changes in the world; the first being the scale of immigration and how the EU was being blamed for it, which hadn't been happening before, emphasising the dramatic effect of the TV footage of the historic movement of people out of North Africa and Central Asia, and how it had seemed to have stumped EU nations on the best method to handle it. Another big factor was the 2008 financial crises, which he thinks that economists are still getting to grips with; undermining confidence in the government, Whitehall, big business, the banks, as well as in the EU itself. The last factor was the euro, and how the countries that had adopted it, like Greece – were on fire. Dominic asserts that these three "fundamental forces on public opinion" worked in their direction and were "more important than everything that all the MPs did".

In the 2015 polls, the "odd" picture was the In Campaign being comfortably ahead on average. Internationally, status-quo campaigns nearly always win referendums. From the initial campaign day, the status-quo option begins gaining support, as the change option declines. Which wasn’t an encouraging signal for Dominic – but behind that – there was nearly a third of the population which wanted out, whatever the consequences. Versus a third of the population who liked the EU and adamantly wanted to remain in. And a fifth of the population who disliked the EU but didn't want to face the fears associated with leaving, so were likely to end up voting to stay in instead. The latter being a crucial target market, required to be persuaded to get out to vote, and also the third who wished to remain, who were required to be demotivated to vote.

The core campaign message was the theme of "Take back control". The word "back" specifically triggering "loss aversion", hence seeking to regain something lost. An "interesting" psychological manipulation that worked on multiple different levels; as for a lot of people it represented taking back control over the system itself, meaning from the establishment as a whole, that drove their economy off a cliff in 2008, ie: the friends of Goldman Sachs, the bankers, and high bonus hedge fund managers. Conjuring a vague feeling of reprisal for the working classes on "PAYE" (Pay-as-you-earn tax), the ones who footed the bailout bills, that they were even taking control back from London.

Secondly, was the message of "350 million pounds in the NHS", which was formulated in different ways, sometimes being "Our official bill for the EU is 350 million pounds a week, we should spend that money on our own priorities", and sometimes they said, "Send 350 millions pounds to the EU per week". The word "send" was used to intentionally provoke the rage of the In Campaign, and after some resistance, they obliged – including by launching an effort urging the BBC to ban the Leave Campaign's marketing bus from their airwaves. This important message "fundamentally neutralised" the people concerned about economic consequences. On the leave side, Dominic claims all their MPs were eager to discuss complex matters related to trade and the single market, etc. But, in reality, he "doesn't know a single MP who understands the single market", and "barely an MP who can define what the single market is". These complicated and abstruse issues are apparently not understood properly by the vast majority involved in politics. The MPs who wished to discuss it were left without a grasping audience, and Cummings team's response was to simply suggest that Britain would have a "free trade deal", which other countries already have with the EU.

Their third messaging aspect was, "To try and make staying in riskier". Therefore highlighting "the next wave of ascension countries", regarding Turkey and other future EU member states waiting to join. Which some Conservative colleagues apparently didn’t apprehend, and criticised as being unfair. They also pushed the idea that it was riskier to stay in the EU than it was to leave. This issue of security and safety formed an important psychological element of the campaign, constituting their fourth messaging strategy.

The fifth criteria being "Anti-establishment", again tapping into the sentiment over the 2008 financial crash. Pointing out the ratio of CEO pay and its changes over the last 30 years. A topic that riled Westminster and which they tried hard to keep out of the headlines.

Cummings thinks one of the most important overall aspects of these five messaging strategies is that they cannot be defined as left or right. Whereas, the dominant idea politicians in Westminster have is predicated upon everyone's opinions being neatly packable into a linear left to right scale, "which is empirically false". Dominic states: "the average voter, they are both more left wing and more right wing than the average politician understands." Cameron and Osborne preferred to listen to the pundits and also didn't recognise this.

Cummings side, faced structural disadvantages to get their message across, such as David Cameron being Prime Minister, with the BBC and everyone else following his agenda, and until February, not having any cabinet ministers on board. With the mainstream media being obsessed with big names rather than caring about arguments and issues. These "chicken and egg problems" such as "the Farage problem", and "no cabinet ministers speaking out", led Dominic to the conclusion that he was going to lose...as it meant it was difficult to get any big businesses on board. Meaning risks had to be taken and things done in a "slightly new way".

One such thing, was to bring in a team of physicists, who studied campaigning completely from first principles. Who scanned internationally for reasonable quality studies on "turnout and persuasion", supported by relevant mathematics and replicated results, such as “double-masked controlled trials in the States and whatnot”. After filtering this data, a check-list of the desired principles found in these studies was created, and a communications team built around it, which attempted to exploit each of these elements which the physicists uncovered. Who also "constructed models to help direct resources for the ground campaign", ie, where to send their activists. And helped on doing the digital campaign in a "scientific way". Essentially providing data from many different sources, "website, email, on the ground, canvassing, social media...and traditional polling”. Handed over to "the data science people, sitting at the heart of the operation”.

The data-scientists started by dissecting all the messages and then ran a massive variety of relevant advertisements on Facebook and elsewhere, experimentally, to figure out what worked and what didn't. The standard world-wide polling methodology used since the 1930's takes roughly a thousand person sample, that's random and representative, "then you can rely on the mathematics of the normal distribution, the famous belt curve, and that should give you a pretty accurate picture of what people think." Except the physicists hired by Cummings propose that a more modern and effective polling methodology is to take massive samples of hundreds of thousands of people, preferably millions, and then to use machine learning; which works out "cheaper, faster and more accurate." They also exploited another advantage of these large sample surveys: that they than can produce sub-samples, in which the demographics to be "interrogated" can be manually defined; the Leave Campaign just copying the same categories of demographics used by Facebook on its digital advertising platform. Sucking in that informative data shared on Facebook and then feeding it back into Facebook moulded to their own bespoke advertising criteria, used to target specific categories of demographics, "for example: we will target women between 35 and 45, in these particular geographical entities, who don't have a degree...or, do have a degree...or whatever, etc, etc." Due to the largeness of the samples, a relatively small breakdown provides a useful amount of information.

A whole series of digital experiments were conducted on the back of their conventional polling and focus groups, filtering down the most effective. Almost the entire project's budget was held back until around the last ten days, especially the last three or four. Aiming their adverts at roughly "7 million people" who saw “1.5 billion” digital ads over that very short time period. In parallel, a ground operation was underway, organised by the data boffins, who pinpointed surprised activists exactly to favourable locations – suggested by the data they'd acquired.

The public "switched on maybe four to six weeks before the actual vote". When conversely, another "critical thing happened", that Boris and Gove "really decided they were to put the boot in on Cameron and Osborne, for complicated reasons..." Due to the media's obsession with "process", Cummings "tried to turn the story of the referendum into a story about the alternative government", "and the lobby thought this was fascinating, who was going to be the next leader, blah, blah, blah." So they presented their campaign "in the form of briefings to the lobby, spun as: this is what the alternative government thinks". Suddenly giving them an opportunity for ten days in which they ended up leading the news cycle. There was then a moment when the politicians on TV, were in sync with what the activists were saying the ground, etc, "for the first time in the whole nightmare effort, you had things starting to come together." Thus resulting in a poll shift, that by the end of the campaign, "that third, third, fifth that I talked about had changed", the initial third dropped slightly, the other third grew to about 44%, "ie, more people were convinced by the end of the campaign that the EU was a basket-case, and it would be more dangerous to stay in it." "And crucially, those differential turnouts."

"Essentially, why did this happen? Was it just immigration? No, it wasn't just immigration. If it hadn't been for the 350 million, and turning the campaign, giving people a chance to vote for the NHS, as well as voting against the EU -- without that -- then the economic scares of the establishment would have been too powerful. And we'd have lost." Though Cummings also concedes that leave couldn't have won without immigration, either. Yet, dismisses "false dichotomies" and credits the aforementioned three big forces with creating the winning conditions. Also a series of government mistakes, which his team managed to exploit. Their mistakes being a disaster of an EU re-negotiation, a bad marketing campaign, and "living in a bubble". After the murder of Jo Cox, Cummings says his opponents: "ditched their whole campaign, and stopped talking about economic risks, and turned the whole thing just into, well, we're the good people and you're the bad people. Because that was the self-reinforcing culture you found in London." "And Cameron and Osborne were psyched out by that, and thought, oh, this is what's happening in the rest of the country. Whereas, in fact, as soon as you went outside the M25 and did market research, the rest of the country had a totally different reaction to the murder, than what the rich people in London did."

Cummings Leave Campaign operated on simple, tried and tested rules that work at his own organisations. Keeping even the keenest and most experienced euro-sceptic MPs out of all management roles, which was run by six to ten people, the youngest aged 21, the oldest being Cummings. They made the crucial decisions and managed the project. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were influential contributors but arrived late into proceedings and neither were involved in the management. It was a small, hard working team, which focused on the public, rather than media and "the insider game". Happy to take risks, if it maximised their chance of victory. In the long run Cummings thinks all the parties will learn from his team's success, and are already trying to do so. Mixing "experimental psychology and data-scientists". "The reality is that most communications companies are run by bullshitting charlatans...and most of them should be fired! And I think, that within the next ten years, a massive chunk of them will be fired." "And people in Silicon Valley, others, will increasingly takeover this industry, the way they've taken over other industries.”



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