It may have cost Farage his political raison d’être, too. A survey by YouGov in June found that the popularity of vocal Brexiteers like Farage has plummeted in the year since the referendum, with 78 percent of respondents saying they dislike or really dislike Farage (58 and 83 percent of those surveyed said the same of Conservative Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, respectively). Bannon, meanwhile, has fared no better. A YouGov/HuffPost survey found that only 13 percent of Trump voters still regard Bannon favorably after his public spat with the president this month, with approximately two-thirds of the president’s supporters turning on him.
For all the ideological similarities between Bannon and Farage, there are also important differences. For one thing, they didn’t find their start in the same way. Farage, despite his own railing against the British establishment, has spent much of his life in politics; Bannon, conversely, is more of a political novice, having spent the majority of his career working in finance and Hollywood. And while both share similar views on nationalism and immigration, only Bannon has succeeded in propelling those views to the U.S.’s highest office; Brexit, meanwhile, has become the responsibility of the U.K.’s ruling Conservative party, not Farage or UKIP.
It’s their ideological similarities, however, that could spell trouble for both of them. “They have an exaggerated sense of how many people actually bought into their core agenda,” Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester and a research investigator at the independent think tank U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me. He noted that while both men were able to successfully leverage a contentious wedge issue—nationalism—to unite different groups among their respective electorates and catapult themselves to the top, they didn’t necessarily earn enough widespread support to stay there. “Ultimately their influence does have some relationship to their electoral power. Farage got himself on the agenda because he was pulling votes from the Conservatives; Bannon catapulted Trump to the top through a series of upset primary wins. So the same mechanism that put them up can pull them down—and is already pulling them down, it seems.”
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