Hillary Clinton and her team might want to pay heed to the fallout from the historic Brexit vote in the UK, at their own peril if they don’t.
Because if anybody there or anywhere else thinks the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders uprisings are going to just peter out by the fall to clear the way for an easy Clinton landslide win, think again.
British Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t call the referendum vote thinking Leave would win the day in the UK, either. He was just following up on an empty campaign promise, and the smart money wasn’t just on Remain winning, but doing so convincingly, and putting the Brexit nonsense to bed for good.
And we saw how that all worked out.
There is nativist sentiment on the part of the far right at play in the Brexit shocker, to be sure. But just as we’ve seen in America with the appeal of the very different Trump and Sanders to their very different constituencies on the right and the left, the Leave forces were able to tap into an undercurrent in a forgotten political class that spans the ideological spectrum to build their winning coalition.
Disaffected working-class folks on the right and left in the UK formed the backbone of Leave, just as the same formed the backbone of the Trump and Sanders movements here in the U.S.
Interesting is how the Conservatives and Labor both backed Remain in the Brexit debate. The outcome, it seems, harkens almost to a proletarian revolt against the elites as much as anything else.
Clinton, in the States, would be wise to recognize this. The assumption in the chattering classes here is that she wins in November in a Nixon-beats-McGovern- or LBJ-beats-AuH20-type landslide, and maybe she does, but not if she plays this as politics-as-usual.
Trump, for all his disorganization and tendency to stick his junk in the mashed potatoes on the buffet line just because he thinks it’s hilarious and knows it will get attention, has a coalition resembling Leave as his tailwind: the nativists who lap up his talk about Latinos, Muslims and women, and the disaffecteds who checked out of politics a generation ago because they didn’t think either the Rs or the Ds gave a crap about them, and that it was all just a game that pointy-headed people play.
A key here for Clinton is that one difference between the upcoming U.S. election and the Brexit vote is Sanders, whose near-upset in the Democratic presidential race gave voice to the disaffecteds on the left.
If Clinton can co-opt the Bernie Bros, November could turn out to be Nixon or LBJ beating up on McGovern or Goldwater.
If the Clinton we were talking about here was the 1990s version of Bill, I’d have no doubt that he’d be on top of what needed to be done, the way he stole Ross Perot’s thunder, twice, to get elected and re-elected.
The Bill of 2016, and the Hillary of 2016, don’t strike me as being that savvy. And the more that they marginalize Bernie to run, triangulating, to the center to try to steal votes from Republican elites who can’t fathom right now that they could ever pull the lever for Trump, the more they’re going to find out, the hard way, on a certain Wednesday in November that they’ve misread things.
The power in politics right now is with the people, not the elites.
Think I’m overstating things there? The UK is leaving the EU.
Column by Chris Graham
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