We know a lot of the shift comes from the demographic changes. About 600,000 younger voters, who are in general far more pro-EU, join the electorate every year while a similar number of older pro-Brexit people leave it - for obvious reasons that we don't need to dwell on here.
We also know that leave voters are more likely to have changed their minds than remainers. I noted a tweet the other day from someone who claimed they had never met a remainer who regretted their vote. I would like to think that’s true but I know it isn’t. However, what the polls tell us is that leave regretters significantly outnumber remain regretters.
You can clearly see this in the latest YouGov poll which shows 91% of remainers still think Brexit was wrong while just 69% of leavers now think it was right. This number has been falling steadily since 2017. It means almost a third (31%) of leavers have changed their mind (20% believing it was a mistake and 11% switching to don't know). This is compared to just 9% of remainers.
Note this isn't the demographic effect but actual 2016 voters changing their minds.
But I was looking at a post on this blog from March 2019 which covered some polling done by Professor Sir John Curtice about the voter's judgment on Brexit at that time. What was unique about it as far as I know, was that the cohort was not a random weighted sample but a panel of people whose opinions on Brexit had been sought several times since 2016.
I'm not sure how big the sample was but it must have been a reasonable number for Professor Curtice to rely on it.
The pollsters were able to compare the answers given by the respondents and found in the original survey in 2016, 51% said they had voted to leave and 49% to remain. This was close to the actual result (51.9% to 48.1%) and therefore representative of the electorate as a whole.
But 3 years later, when asked the same question, 54% claimed to have voted to remain against 46% who said they voted to leave. I can believe some - a very small number - had genuinely forgotten although that would only show how indifferent they were to the outcome. Would you really forget how you voted on such a momentous matter?
It was so odd that the pollsters commented on it (page 15):
"In our September 2016 survey, for example, 49% said that they had voted Remain, while 51% indicated that they had backed Leave, figures that are only one point adrift of the actual outcome. However, the proportion who report having voted Remain has gradually increased during the course of the last two years, and in our most recent survey, 54% said they had voted Remain, while only 46% said that they had backed Leave."
I suspect it's far more likely that the majority of those suffering apparent amnesia were ashamed of voting to leave the EU and didn’t want to admit having done it, especially given what a mess we were in at the time. If you recall, Mrs May was struggling to get MPs to agree to anything with a series of indicative votes showing no majority in the House of Commons for any particular form of Brexit.
I know personally that this is already happening since a former work colleague that I met in 2018 told me had hadn't voted at all although I had spoken to someone we both knew who said he was absolutely sure my friend had voted to leave because he had openly boasted about it. Despite saying he hadn't voted, he said he thought the EU "would give us a good deal." Little did he know then that we were not even going to ask for one.
Now I’m quite prepared to believe that if the same cohort was polled again, the numbers may have returned to 51% leave and 49% remain. It’s not impossible. Things were pretty shambolic at the time and have since settled down a bit. But given the state of the polls, I’m far more inclined to think they would be even worse than in 2019.
And as long as the economy remains in the doldrums there will be no change of direction. Eventually, hardly anyone will admit to having voted to leave the EU.
