The Tories are dominating the referendum campaign and that’s not good news for Remain

The Tories are dominating the referendum campaign and that’s not good news for Remain

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If the referendum is seen solely as a Tory/right wing affair then non Tory/non right wing voters might not bother voting

Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture has analysed the media coverage of the first few weeks of the referendum campaign. As we can see in the table above, it is being dominated by the Tories. If we look at the table below, unsuprisingly the Tories dominate the top 10 individual appearances as well.

All of this risks making it seem to non Tory/non right wing voters this referendum is an issue solely for Tories/right wing voters, and thus they might not participate. For Remain to win, they need Labour supporters to vote and back Remain.

If Cameron wants June 23rd to be his Waterloo, then Labour voters are his Blücher, which my, my, is a most awkward position for a Tory Prime Minister to be in. This might explain why David Cameron is shared a platform with Sadiq Khan this morning, only a few weeks after that infamous Tory campaign in the London Mayoral election.

Interestingly in the first phase of the campaign, Immigration only featured around 11% of the time, with that being Leave’s strongest issue, and the plan by Vote Leave to crank the volume up to eleven on immigration from now on, Leave might see a substantial swing to them in the polls the final few weeks of the referendum campaign.

This is the first in series of reports, I plan to follow up on this piece when the next report by Loughborough University is published.

TSE

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