"...May's rationale was this: Why not take advantage of the Labour party's decision to place its fate in the hands of 68-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed 1970s-vintage Marxist whom the press and the public hated?
Look at the guy!
He made Bernie Sanders look mainstream by comparison.
His platform called for investing half a trillion pounds in rebuilding Britain's industrial infrastructure, building millions of homes, making universities free, and re-nationalizing the country's railways, utilities and postal service.He proposed to pay for all that by hiking corporate tax rates from 17 to 26 percent and imposing punitive taxes on real estate and incomes over $100,000 a year.
Yes, the media was foursquare against Corbyn, just as May's advisers had optimistically assumed, and even a majority of his own party's members of parliament opposed his leadership.
But neither the press nor the politicians had a clue what the public thought.
The public weren't disliking Corbyn's platform as much as they were supposed to.
Corbyn would have been a terrible candidate in a national election if this were 1974, when he entered politics, or 1983, when he first got elected to Parliament.
He opposed the Falklands war and backed Fidel Castro, the IRA, and the PLO.
But the Falklands War is over, Castro is dead, the IRA is disarmed, and the PLO has been superseded. And a good number of the voters who showed up for Corbyn were not born back in those days.
Like Sanders, Corbyn has found a way to thrill university students and senior citizens, even while his appeal remains almost inaudible to those born between 1952 and 1992.
Youth turnout on Thursday appears to have been high..."
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