I was absolutely convinced that Britain was going to stay in Europe but, then again, I also thought England might do okay in the Euro's so what do I know? Evidently, not much. Why did I think this? Because almost everything I read on the internet was supportive of staying in Europe. Mainstream media seemed to largely agree that leaving Europe could potentially have negative consequences. Even some newspapers from the right who had previously spent many articles moaning about the EU weren't being particularly vocal in supporting brexit. As for social media, I genuinely only saw THREE people I know write that they wanted us to leave. That is in comparison to the literal hundreds of people I saw posting articles, rants, blogs, videos and opinions of how awful it would be if we did leave.
It's pretty much how things seem with Trump. Except, instead of having three people I know supporting him there are zero. Not one single person on my social media has shown any kind of supportive opinion towards Trump. I mean, the guy is so easy to hate that it feels like you're booing Jafar at the panto, everyone is joining in and there is a sense of camaraderie in doing so. At this point, writing a blog post about how awful he is and all the terrible things he has said would honestly seem too easy. The challenge would be finding something nice to write about him (ummm, he has good teeth?). Don't shoot me for that compliment by the way. Even the mainstream media are having a field day with him. Journalists have probably never had it so easy because Trump practically hands them negative material to write about him.
So, if you had asked me before the 24th June when the Brexit vote was announced, I would have said that Trump has absolutely no chance of winning. However, as seen with Brexit, the public still has the ability to surprise us and go against the general consensus shown on the internet. So why is this? It's possibly because the kind of people who would vote for Trump are less likely to share their opinions on social media. They might be older and have less access to social media or they might be worried that if they openly supported Trump they could be made fun of and/or labelled as being prejudice. Therefore, his supporters exist in higher numbers than we realise because we just don't hear from them as much.
Another possibility is that Trump could win because everyone is talking about him. Most people from the right to the left are spending a lot more time and effort talking about Trump than they are about Hillary. Me included I guess seeing as I only just mentioned her. Take reality television for example. It might seem a bit of a stretch to compare American politics to reality television but it really isn't. If you have two finalists people can vote for and one is a bit of an arsehole but provides entertainment whilst the other seems nicer but is a bit boring, there is a good chance that the entertaining areshole will win. This is pretty much what happened in Celebrity Big Brother 2016. Again, it might seem a bit tenuous to compare Celebrity Big Brother to the presidential race but when you watch the debate between Hillary and Trump which was basically an hour and a half of immature name calling rather than political debate, it really isn't that difficult to make the comparison. Unfortunately, divisive opinion might just get more votes than indifference.
