Why you can't win over the public by "saying what they think:" A Thread.
1. Most people don't know enough about politics and economics to give politicians a useful idea of what they think. A quarter of Brits don't know what "Chancellor of the Exchequer" means.

2. There is no such thing as "what people think." Not only do people think different things, the same person thinks contradictory things about the same issue at the same time. They say different things about the same issue in different contexts.

3. People frequently say things they don't mean and don't believe! For example in focus groups people consistently advocated for a flat rate council tax because it was fair. Well, we already tried that. It was called the poll tax. The Ed Stone was a product of focus groups.

4. People are very malleable. See this graph of how important the EU was to people before / after Cameron announced the referendum. If you are just "saying what people think" but your opponents are persuading, you'll soon find yourself repeating your opponents' messages

5. The human mind is not a blank slate, it is more like a swamp. It is a living ecosystem of culture, values, personal experiences, anxieties and so on. Anything you put in there interacts with what is already in there, with sometimes unexpected results.

6. Political context matters! If you're in the pub with someone and you say "law and order is the most important thing!" They may agree and listen to you. If you're the Labour leader and you say that, you are reinforcing the frames of the law-and-order party, the Tories.

7. Have you seen polling on the hostile environment? People really, really like it. Is Labour going to come out in support of it? And if it does, I think asking whether the Labour Party has any purpose at all is a valid question.

There is more to say on this but I'll stop there. In short, politics is the business of persuasion. And Dominic Cummings gets that, by the way.

Let me be clear: it is REALLY important to do public attitudes research. Focus groups are really useful. BUT the purpose of this work is for you to understand the landscape in which you form your argument. NOT so you can parrot what people say back at them https://twitter.com/robertnpalmer/status/1305451731174686721