A Brexit bump for Trump?
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This article covering the 2016 presidential election was written outside the scope of Ballotpedia's encyclopedic coverage and does not fall under our neutrality policy or style guidelines. It is preserved as it was originally written. For our encyclopedic coverage of the 2016 election, click here.
This page was current as of the 2016 election.
June 24, 2016
By Jim Barnes
Could the stunning news that voters in the United Kingdom backed a referendum on Thursday to leave the European Union, boost the presidential prospects of Donald Trump less than four months from now when U.S. voters go to the polls?
Donald Trump sure thinks so. At a press conference in Scotland today at his golf resort in Turnberry, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said, “People really see a big parallel.” Echoing themes he’s stressed in his own campaign, Trump told reporters in Turnberry, “You’re taking your country back. You’re going to let people you want into your country.”
Outside of a belt of constituencies from Oxford in the west and Cambridge in the north down to London and its environs, and Scotland, the rest of the country largely supported Brexit.[1] Support for Remain (in the EU) came in places that were generally better off financially, had higher levels of educational attainment, and were more racially diverse.
At the same time, a lot of working class Labour voters in Wales, the Midlands and industrial north voted for Leave. (It was Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath who led Great Britain into the EU in 1972-1973.) Conservative voters in Tory strongholds in southwestern and eastern England defied their own prime minister, David Cameron, and backed Brexit as well. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a comparable election in the U.K. or the U.S. that so cleaved the country’s two major parties.
This is not a big surprise. In Britain, many Conservative and Labour voters echoed disdain for the “politicians in Westminster,” home of Parliament, just as U.S. voters have expressed contempt for “politicians in Washington” without much regard to party. The pro-Remain forces had the backing of both Cameron and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, scores of British CEO’s, economists from right to left, the Archbishop of Canterbury and even English soccer icon, David Beckham. But as Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party—a driving force behind Brexit—declared last night the UK vote was “a victory for ordinary people.”
Indeed, the populist verdict from Great Britain seems to have been in part, at least, a revolt against elites, which is right in Trump’s wheelhouse. Concerns over immigration motivated the pro-Leave forces, just as they’ve propelled Trump’s candidacy. And there was a tension in the Brexit returns between London, one of the world’s flourishing financial capitals, and many British cities and towns that have not rebounded as well from the 2008 global economic collapse. Austerity-driven British budgets have limited the ability of the Cameron government to cushion working-class voters from the effects of that downturn. One challenge for Trump is that the U.S. electorate is much more diverse than the U.K.’s voters. According to a survey by British Future, a think tank that focuses on issues of U.K. identity, only one-in-10 of the voters in the 2015 parliamentary elections was an ethnic minority.[2] The Pew Research Center estimates that three-in-10 voters in the 2016 presidential election will be non-white.[3]
Another is that immigration appears to have been the key issue in the Brexit vote, while the economy is still the dominant concern in the U.S.[4][5]
In 1979, the election of the Conservative Party’s Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister was seen as a harbinger of Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency in 1980. Those two elections upset the political dynamics on both sides of the pond and heralded an era of conservative governance in both the U.K and the U.S. To be sure, the electoral environments in the two countries today, while both volatile, are not the same. But it would be a mistake to assume that the populist impulse which smashed political coalitions in the Brexit referendum this week couldn’t shake up the presidential election come November.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer at Ballotpedia who has covered every Democratic and Republican national convention since 1984. He will be in Cleveland and Philadelphia for Ballotpedia in July.
See also
- Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Presidential election, 2016/Polls
- ↑ BBC, "EU Referendum Results," accessed June 24, 2016
- ↑ [http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ethnicminorityvote2015.pdf British Future, "General Election 2015 and the ethnic minority vote," May 2015]
- ↑ Pew Research Center, "2016 electorate will be the most diverse in U.S. history," February 3, 2016
- ↑ Ipsos MORI, "Immigration is now the top issue for voters in the EU referendum," June 2016
- ↑ Gallup, "Economy Trumps Foreign Affairs as Key 2016 Election Issue," May 15, 2015
