Make America Great Again Hat White Brexit

'Brand America Bully Again', aka #MAGA, is indisputably a swell slogan. Or as Trump would put it, a really really great and wonderful slogan.

It does all the things you want a slogan to do. It'southward curt and punchy, like shooting fish in a barrel to recall, yet fun to shout the hundredth time, like barracking for a football team.

It conveys a sentiment that's impossible to disagree with, notwithstanding information technology carries a sneaky payload (the exclamation that America isn't groovy any more, and it's the other lot'due south fault).

The Brexiters had a killer slogan too. 'Take Dorsum Control'. Once again: short, punchy, impossible to deny. And information technology had also a sneaky payload: yous've lost command and it'south Europe's fault.

I couldn't tell y'all what the Remainers' slogan was. And I can't tell you what Hillary Clinton's is, either.

Donald Trump'due south slogan has caught on. Credit:Bloomberg

2. Facts don't matter

If y'all're a liberal you probably obsessively posted Facebook links to fact-check columns on Trump in which he endlessly states not-truths that anyone with a passing familiarity with Google can disprove in a microsecond.

Sorry, it won't assist.

This isn't even almost the 'post-fact politics' that everyone is going on about.

Ballot politics have never been well-nigh facts.

People don't vote on facts. They vote on promises. When you vote, yous're choosing a future. And there are no facts almost the futurity. Nothing.

There are only predictions and promises.

The Brexiteers lied and fudged. They fabricated claims nigh European union regulations that were rubbish, they vastly overestimated the cyberspace British contribution to the EU budget and then they said all that money could instead be spent on the NHS.

They said Europe would exist fine with a United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland that rejected European immigration but stayed in the single market.

They implied that the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland had no sovereignty on issues that, in fact, it had plenty of sovereignty over.

They flatly contradicted an array of economists who predicted economical gloom.

Brexit leader Michael Gove was mocked for proverb "people in this state have had enough of experts".

But he was correct. Voters by and large don't consult experts for the facts before voting.

Britain's National Health Services was used every bit function of the Exit entrada. Credit:Getty Images

3. Polls can exist incorrect and often are

British pollsters famously got both the Brexit and the 2022 UK general ballot wrong.

In its post-election assay, YouGov admitted it had oversampled the immature and undersampled the old. Only some other 1.four per cent of the error they just couldn't piece of work out.

After Brexit they had another go. They complained that people paid likewise much attending to the polls that predicted Remain and dismissed the ones that predicted Leave. If you don't think Trump will win, you discount polls that predict the reverse.

They also constitute online polls were much more accurate than phone polls, which skewed the 'poll of polls' estimate which is supposed to smooth out errors.

More generally, polling experts say the Brexit pollsters applied 'sampling fault' corrections that corresponded to increasingly outdated predictions about how people vote (see beneath).

The importance of these corrections is brought dwelling past a recent experiment by The New York Times, in which they gave four reputable pollsters the same raw polling information.

The pollsters came dorsum with Clinton at +iv, +3 and +ane, and Trump at +1.

This wasn't the margin of error, by which different polls get different results by sampling different people. This was the inner fudging of the pollsters, exposed.

Post-Brexit breakdowns of voting patterns revealed that the biggest determinant of someone's vote was their level of education.

An overwhelming proportion of voters with postal service-graduate degrees voted Remain.

An overwhelming proportion of voters with no mail service-loftier-school qualifications voted Exit.

It was a bigger determinant than income, or race, or political allegiance, or geographical location.

Arguably, the US election is a like post-party-political i: many Americans are not really voting for a Republican or a Democrat, they are voting on what those people represent: the 'political establishment' vs a 'mad as hell and not going to take it whatsoever more' interloper.

This is a similar option to the Brexit choice.

Then the split among voters is likely to exist the aforementioned.

And if at that place is a large, non-third-educated hinterland set and mobilised to vote for Trump, they're non where the media are, and they're not where your social media are (and, every bit above, they're not where the pollsters are).

They're invisible, and they're most to vote.

Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP, tapped into the angry voter during the Brexit entrada. Credit:Getty Images

5. The simply thing to fright is fright itself

'Projection Fearfulness' is said to have won the Scottish referendum fence: a loud and relentless barrage of bad news about what independence would mean for the Scots.

In the Brexit fence, the Remain campaign was repeatedly derided every bit 'Projection Fear Marker 2', for its dire predictions of post-Brexit economic woe.

But Leave played on fear also – and much more finer.

This was fear of immigrants taking jobs, taking houses, taking school places, taking infirmary beds.

This was fear of Brussels smothering British justice and strangling business with red tape.

This was fear of the rising of Deutschland as a bigger, stronger European power.

This was fear of the dead-weight outcome of Greece etc on the continent's economy.

Just information technology was mostly fright of immigrants.

A taxi driver in Liverpool told me last month he voted for Brexit because "one of my passengers was raped by a group of Somali men at a nightclub".

I asked him what that had to do with the EU.

He didn't answer.

Fear of immigrants is the political theme of the last 2 years, at least. As a tool to mobilise voters, it works.

And Trump owns it.

half-dozen. Bonus points

And then not to leave you utterly depressed, here are a couple of comforting points.

- In both the Brexit and Scottish referenda, the side with the almost legacy media back up won the 24-hour interval.

- Hillary Clinton has several qualities that David Cameron lacked.

- None of the major Brexit proponents, not even Boris Johnson, had been recorded boasting virtually grabbing women'due south undercarriage.

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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/make-america-great-again-is-a-great-slogan-and-other-lessons-from-brexit-for-the-us-election-20161012-gs05gm.html