i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.

> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.

65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.

> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.

i completely agree.

but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.

interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat

> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)

2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.

> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).

> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.

^ ipsos mori/KCL study

there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.

3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!

4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).

> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).