Does Brexit herald a Trump victory?

Is Brexit a good omen for Donald Trump’s presidential bid? The parallels are certainly compelling, said Edward J. Rollins on Realclearpolitics.com. The UK vote showed that Brits are no longer prepared to put up with unlimited immigration and being ignored by an out-of-touch “elitist bureaucracy”. Many Americans feel much the same – and they, too, seem ready to upend what they regard as a “broken status quo”. Don’t be surprised if Trump delivers another electoral shock in November. If nothing else, said William Mcgurn in The Wall Street Journal, Brexit should be a warning to “the anti-trump crowd” – who, like the UK Remain advocates, treat all their opponents as ignorant racists – about “the price of condescension in a society where the people are still sovereign”.

The Brexit result should jolt liberals out of any “complacency”, said Andrew Prokop on Vox.com. While the prediction markets may be giving Trump only about a 25% chance of winning, they were giving Brexit less than a 20% chance just before the referendum. True, said Jamelle Bouie on Slate.com, but there are still good reasons to believe Trump won’t be able to pull off the same trick. One relates to polling data. While the Brexit result was ultimately a surprise, the polls had always suggested the race would be tight. US polls, by contrast, show Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Trump. A key reason for this is that the US, unlike Britain, has a big contingent of non-white voters: whereas “black and minority ethnic” people make up about 8% of the UK electorate, people of colour account for nearly a third of US voters. That imposes “an electoral penalty for embracing the most reactionary elements of national life”.

Brexit has nothing to do with Trump, said David French in the National Review. Drawing parallels between these two things is “just a way for elites to try to discredit” the UK vote. Was Brexit partly about people voicing concerns about immigration and asserting national sovereignty? Yes, but on that basis you could compare it “to virtually any GOP nominee of the last 40 years”. At heart, though, the British vote reflected uniquely British concerns, chief among which was its long-standing reservations about Europe’s centralising project. Voters chose Brexit because they wanted decisions about the UK to be taken in the UK. That has no bearing on Trump’s campaign, which is about whether Washington is making the right decisions. “This may come as a surprise, but not everything that happens in the world is about Donald Trump.”