These numbers suggest that anti-immigration sentiment drove support for the referendum but wasn’t enough to pass it. On the most generous interpretation, 81 percent of leavers were driven by migration concerns. That translates to 42 percent of the electorate. If you define the anti-immigration vote more narrowly, it was about 30 percent to 45 percent of leavers, which works out to 16 percent to 23 percent of the electorate. You could argue that people who expressed concern about “sovereignty,” “Britain’s ability to make its own laws,” and “Britain’s right to act independently” were really just anti-immigration voters. But that slights their legitimate grievances about the British–EU relationship—an arrangement for which there’s no clear parallel in the United States. And even if you include these people, they don’t boost the anti-immigration “Leave” vote above 40 percent. [...]
These numbers don’t mollify some of Trump’s critics. They worry that pundits have consistently underestimated Trump and that his victory in the Republican primaries, followed by the Brexit vote, shows broad support for his nativist agenda. Brexit suggests that “victory is possible” when “hostility to migrants” is coupled with anti-intellectualism, writes Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books. “There are lessons here aplenty for Americans contemplating their own appointment with nationalist, nativist populism in November.”
That’s true. Brexit is a warning, and we did underestimate Trump before primary season. But in the American electorate as a whole, as opposed to the GOP, there’s no majority for Trump’s views on immigration or ethnicity. [...]
The poll’s GOP respondents broadly support Trump’s agenda. Seventy-three percent say immigration from predominantly Muslim countries is too high or shouldn’t be allowed at all. Sixty-eight percent say the same about immigration from the Middle East. Sixty-six percent want a wall on the Mexican border, 66 percent want a ban on Syrian refugees, 64 percent want a temporary halt to entry by foreign Muslims, and 60 percent favor “a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants.”
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