At almost every campaign stop these days, Donald Trump urges his supporters not to lose heart just because most opinion polls show him headed for defeat. Look, he says, at what happened with Brexit — the British vote in favor of exiting the European Union in June that shocked the political and media elite of the United Kingdom.
In the past few days, Trump has predicted that America’s white working-class is poised to deliver an election-day sequel he’s called “Another Brexit,” “Beyond Brexit,” “Brexit Plus,” or “Brexit Times Five.” [...]
To start with, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight observed last week, it is simply not true that the polls in Britain predicted a vote against Brexit in the final weeks of that campaign. [...]
Perhaps more importantly, the idea that the American electorate is similar to the British one on the issue Trump has made the centerpiece of his campaign, immigration, is not borne out by evidence.
Having spent a good part of my childhood shuttling between the United States and the British Isles, I can attest that one of the most common errors Americans make about Britain is failing to understand just how different the two cultures are, particularly with regard to attitudes on immigration, despite sharing a (more or less) common language.
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