Brexit and Donald Trump: Why it Won't Happen Here

After Brexit, many are asking wether this means it will happen here as well. Some are claiming that Brexit makes Trump more likely to win.

I don't know about that. It could just as easily go the other way where Americans recoil from what happened in Britain to make sure it doesn't happen here.

A lot of folks have read Brexit as an anti elite message more broadly.

Chris Hayes and a female guest last night-with apologies I didn't get her name-more or less tag teamed Josh Barro on the question of whether Trump can happen here.

Now of course, he could happen. The election odds have given him a roughly 20 to 25 percent chance-just after he won the nomination this got as high as 30 percent. This was something Scott Sumner has been arguing regarding betting markets: sometimes the more unlikely event happens.

The question is about likelihood. All we can ever speak of is probability.

Hayes and his guest insisted on seeing this in a nice, tidy narrative:

1. The conventional wisdom thought Trump could never win the GOP primary.

2. The conventional wisdom was sure Brexit wouldn't happen.

3. Now they argue the conventional wisdom says Hillary will win but items 1 and 2 show the CW may well be dead wrong here too.

But the Nate Silver answer is best. Follow the polls. The reason the CW got in trouble in both 1 and 2 is it ignored the polls.

The polls all along made it clear Trump had a real chance to win. The CW simply scoffed. He can't win, he's just a boomlet or Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.

Now as regular readers of Last Men and Overmen know, I never made this mistake. Since last July I had argued that Trump absolutely could win.

As for 2, the CW again ignored the polls which showed a very tight race either way.

"After #Brexit, I'm not believing any polls.

"Brexit led in the polls until Sunday, so BZZZZZZT."

https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/746533830979366912

The Brexit polls showed at best a coin flip but the pundits assumed everything would be fine and Brexit simply wouldn't happen. I have to admit that I fell for this too even though at the back of my mind I realized that the poll showed a coin flip.

But that's confirmation bias for you. I wanted to believe Brexit had no chance-both because I think it's a big mistake and also the added individual point that I'm a British citizen living abroad myself with savings in the UK that were supposed to come out of Britain soon.

So when I saw the market up so big this week, the pound rising, and everyone on CNBC on Thursday saying 'Of course, Remain will win' when even Nigel Farage was saying this at 6 pm Eastern Time, it was easy to be lulled into complacency.

But if you kept your eyes on the ball-the polls-there was no ground for such complacency.

So I agree with Barro. Trump is much less likely to happen here. For a host of reasons.

I think there are two big reasons why the US won't go Donald Trump.

1. We are just 63 percent white as opposed to the British who are a much whiter nation.

"What Brexit suggests, to many American commentators, is that Trump could in fact win. Despite our differences with the U.K.,writes Andrew Prokop for Vox, “the Brexit result should jolt American liberals out of any complacence they may feel about Trump’s candidacy.” Amy Davidson echoed this in theNew Yorker. “The Brexit results are a strong warning for anyone complacent about Donald Trump,” she wrote. I’m skeptical. What’s striking about the results of the EU referendum is the extent to which they matched the polls. Every survey of Brexitshowed a close race between the two sides—a coin toss. The balance of the polls suggested a narrow—but far from dispositive—lead for “Remain.” The final result was in line with the projection: a contest with no clear advantage for either side in which “Leave” won an extremely modest victory. Here in the United States, our polls show a substantial Trump loss in the general election against Hillary Clinton, just as they showed a substantial Trump win in the Republican presidential primaries. The chief reason is that, unlike the U.K., the U.S. has a large voting population of nonwhites: Latinos, black Americans, Asian Americans, etc. In Britain, “black and minority ethnic” people make up about 8 percent of the electorate. By contrast, people of color account for nearly 1 in 3 American voters. In practice, this means that in the past two national elections, there has been an electoral penalty for embracing the most reactionary elements of national life. And we see this in the polling between Trump and Clinton. If the United States were largely white—if its electorate were as monochromatic as Britain’s—then Trump might have the advantage. As it stands, people of color in America are acting as a firewall for liberalism—an indispensable barrier to this surge of ethno-nationalism. Complacency isn’t called for, but confidence isn’t wrong either."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/embattled_whiteness_gave_us_brexit_it_won_t_give_us_president_trump.html
2. We don't have the disastrous euro system. Britain didn't live under the euro, but they used this as an excuse to Brexit.

I do agree that if the euro system hadn't been such a disaster, Brexit probably wouldn't have gotten so much traction.

In this sense, America is sort of the Great White Hope, you might say, except that what makes us hopeful is we aren't so White.

I think the future in America in the next few years is much brighter precisely because we don't have the euro problem and we are so much more diverse.