The problem with analysing electoral trends is that sometimes it’s the grand sweep of history, and other times it’s specific circumstances that get quickly forgotten.
Maybe the Brexiters wouldn’t have won the referendum if they’d hadn’t put Turkey front and centre of the campaign - but Turkey has now been entirely erased from our collective memory of that event.
Maybe Corbyn would have done just as well in 2017 if May hadn’t led such a dire campaign and catastrophically botched her social care plans - but that, too, frequently gets excluded from the narrative.
The point is this stuff is hard. Yes, it’s deindustrialisation and the rise of nationalism, but it’s also who the leader was and what led the bulletins. Narratives, like luck, can change.
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