People like to be told what they want to hear. It reinforces the belief they know best.
They did not vote for Brexit knowing it wrong or because they are personally thick. They voted for Brexit because they thought it was right. And the people they trusted told them so.
You and I may regard them as thick, or at the very least, misguided but it was their judgement.
There were also many highly intelligent and able folk who thought Brexit right - I personally knew many whose judgement and behaviours I had (and still have) the utmost respect for.
We disagreed - but they had every right to come to the conclusions they did based on the same information I had to form a different opinion.
The slogans "take back control" and "get Brexit done" and "no deal is better than a bad deal" were very powerful statements of intent. I recall nothing of even close to similar impact from Remain.
It is no surprise the Brexiteers triumphed against the odds. I recall Nigel Farage wandering around utterly bemused by the turn of events post referendum - he clearly expected to have lost.
Remainers lost the referendum not because the Brexit camp behaved badly - they simply fought a completely rubbish campaign. And in the period during negotiations in 2019 completely failed to engineer any sort of organised resistance to what became inevitable.
As a rule, I hate to use the word thick and desperately try to avoid it.
However, in this case, the following certainly holds true:
The "least well educated" voted in larger proportion for Brexit.
(That doesn't itself mean that "least well educated" equates to being thick - this is something I strongly disagree with, but see more...)
The entrenched and partisan views meant that there were a great many individuals who simply brushed aside the true and well evidenced facts, because they didn't
want to believe these true and well evidenced facts.
That means those people were Wantonly Ignorant.
That combination, both least well educated, plus Wantonly Ignorant, to me, is a combination that fits with the description of being a bit thick.
This was exactly mirrored in recent US Election. There's a reason that Tangerine loves the least well educated.
I also cannot remember the psychologist who led the research on this, but categorised four different groups according to:
Benefitting others
Harming others
Benefitting self
Harming self.
I might be misremembering, but I think those that fell into the quadrant of harm self AND harm others were classified as thick?
The other classifications?
Bandit - benefit self, harm others (Trump, Farage, Johnson, Tice, Hobbit Yaxley,...)
Intelligent - benefit self, benefit others
Helpless - benefit others, harm self.
