WILL STRAW is a man in a hurry. Shadowing him on a recent visit to York—a whirl of leaps in and out of taxis, impromptu speeches, marches up shopping streets and down corridors—Bagehot was impressed by the energy and seriousness of Britain’s chief pro-EU campaigner. But was it all really necessary? York is the sort of well-heeled, studenty place that Remain, which does best among middle-class folk and youngsters, should have in the bag.

Sure enough, at every stop on his tour (apart from a couple of old ladies who shoved their leaflets in a bin) the director of Britain Stronger In Europe (BSE) and his lieutenants seemed to encounter fellow pro-Europeans. A shopper in St Sampson’s Square gave campaigners in their rain-sodden “I’m In” T-shirts a thumbs up; a scientist at the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratory waxed Europhile about research grants and freedom of movement; a crowd at the students’ union at York University agreed with Mr Straw’s every word. “You go to electronics and they’ll tell you how much of their funding is from the EU,” one told him.

Yet even here BSE has its work cut out. It estimates that around 35% of British voters are for EU membership. About another 35% are undecided. The campaign should surely be able to win over enough of these to cross the 50% line. But it will only succeed on June 23rd if those persuaded actually vote. So the second part of BSE’s job is to get them fired up, or at least sufficiently engaged to cast their ballots. Hence Mr Straw’s visit to York. “This is the fight of our lives and the other side are incredibly passionate about this issue, so we have to fight that passion,” he told the students.

Current polling puts the two campaigns roughly neck-and-neck, with Remain slightly ahead. But in the latest survey by Ipsos MORI support for Remain slips from 54% to 49% when only people who say they are certain to vote are polled.

Why? Consider the difference between the two sides. The Leave campaigns are loud, discordant and spirited, run by people who have obsessed about an EU referendum for decades. They think they can win if they make it a vote on immigration. Thus lurid claims about foreign criminals and “winning back our country” froth forth from Vote Leave and Leave.eu, the two main anti-EU outfits. BSE, by contrast, is calmer and more businesslike. It reckons it can prevail by focusing voters’ minds on Britain’s economic future and the risks of the unknown. So it has lined up serious establishment types—from businessmen and former generals to theatre directors and educationalists—to make hard-nosed arguments about jobs, investment and security: a virtuous cup of green tea to the Eurosceptics’ more stimulating brew.

Demography accentuates Leave’s edge. In the general election in 2015 turnout was 78% among the over-65s, who are overwhelmingly Eurosceptic, and 43% among those aged 18 to 24, who are overwhelmingly pro-EU. The Remain campaign’s firmest bastions are a list of groups not given to voting. City dwellers vote less than suburban and rural folk. Many students are not registered and, as the vote will take place outside term time, will be away from their usual addresses—at music festivals, for example (there are no polling stations at Glastonbury). Expats too are often absent from records and lose the vote after 15 years anyway. A recent shift from household to individual registration has seen up to 1m voters drop off the lists. A disproportionate number are the sort of young, transient types more likely to vote Remain, adds Matthew Goodwin of the University of Kent.

In graphics: A guide to “Brexit” from the European Union Combine that with narrowing polls (in Ipsos MORI’s surveys Remain’s lead has dropped from 26 points in December to seven now), the fact that voters have sometimes veered towards Euroscepticism towards the end of EU referendum campaigns elsewhere and the risk of a terror attack or migration drama grabbing headlines in the weeks before the poll, and it is easy enough to see why Mr Straw is in a hurry. His side may be in the lead, but Britain’s EU membership hangs by a thread. Is he up to the job? Here there are grounds for optimism. BSE is well-run, dynamic and less fractious than its anti-EU rivals, whose passion can hurt them, tipping them into damaging public squabbles and distracting them from the mechanics of the campaign. The Remain campaign recognises the scale of its task, its lieutenants criss-crossing the country geeing up local groups, university chapters (of which there are now more than 50) and student-registration drives. Contrary to Leave’s complaints, Remain has mongered more realism than fear—voters deserve to know the real risks of Brexit—and kept its tone broadly sunny. That should help, notes Mr Goodwin, who along with Simon Hix of the London School of Economics has found that the positive Remain arguments are more effective than the (ubiquitous, so priced in) Leave ones.

Waiting for Corbo

Yet all this may not be enough. Only six months old, BSE does not have the local infrastructure needed to overturn its turnout disadvantage. For that it needs the help of political parties. But the Conservatives are divided and, locally, overtly Eurosceptic. So Mr Straw—and for that matter David Cameron—is reliant on the Labour Party, the majority of which is pro-EU, to put its machine at Remain’s service. Jeremy Corbyn, its left-wing leader, dislikes the capitalists in Brussels and is at best ambivalent about membership. Thus pro-Europeans in his party, led by Alan Johnson, a former minister, have been given few resources. Its canvassers have not been instructed to expend much effort engaging with its supporters about the EU; almost half of voters do not even know that it is formally for membership. BSE is good, better than some of its critics allow. But it cannot win the referendum on its own.

A full transcript of Bagehot’s interview with Will Straw is at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot