The day after voters go to the polls on Nov. 8, millions of Americans will flee the country. Or at least that’s what the polls tell us. According to a March Ipsos poll, 19 percent of Americans would consider moving to Canada if Donald Trump wins. The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency prompted 15 percent of respondents to tell the pollster they’d consider moving north.
It’s a quadrennial tradition: “If the other guy (or gal) wins, I’m leaving the country.” It’s the political equivalent of the childish taunt: “If I don’t get my way, I’m taking my ball and going home.”
Celebrities like Eddie Vedder and Alec Baldwin indulged in this type of rhetoric when George W. Bush was running for president in 2000. This year, actress Lena Dunham said she’d move to Canada if Donald Trump wins. Comedian Jon Stewart has taken things one step further by threatening to leave the planet if Trump wins.
The thing is, it rarely happens. The government doesn’t keep statistics on how many Americans expatriate themselves. By one estimate, 3 million do so every year. But it seems very few will do it for political reasons.
As Adam Alter has written in the Washington Post, “Twelve years ago, as George W. Bush took a commanding lead over John F. Kerry in the polls, Canadian immigration applications tripled. Visits to the immigration department’s website skyrocketed from an average of 20,000 per day to 115,000 the day after Bush won the election.
“A small crop of diehard liberals followed through, but U.S-Canadian immigration was ultimately unchanged in the year following the election.”
Altar cites several studies finding that people don’t follow through on their plans in part because they over-estimate how much pain they’ll feel when their candidate loses.
Then there’s the fact that moving abroad can be prohibitively expensive, time-consuming and even disorienting. Nearly one-third of Americans haven’t even been abroad. And less than one-third have passports.
What’s more, most countries limit the number of immigrants they accept. In most cases, to move to another country requires knowing someone who will act as a sponsor or having a job lined up in an approved occupation. And good luck being granted asylum as a political refugee just because you don’t like the new president. It’s not going to happen.
But the most important reason why few people will leave is that when it comes down to it, a new president won’t change the lives of most people all that much.
Sure, a liberal president may raise their taxes, or perhaps a militaristic president may make parents with kids in their teens or 20s a little nervous about the reinstatement of a draft. But that’s not enough for most people to want to pull up stakes and leave their jobs, schools, friends and family.
As much as the public (and the media) invest in presidential politics, less power resides in the office than is imagined. The founders designed a constitutional system of checks and balances and separation of powers that acts as a bulwark against tyranny by a chief executive with authoritarian tendencies.
What’s more, a lot of power resides at the state and local levels of government and within America’s robust civil society.
Comedian Chris Rock put it much more simply in a “Saturday Night Live” monologue before the 1996 election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole:
“So, we got a big election coming up. Who’s gonna win — Bill or Bob? Does it really matter? Is there anything you can’t do on Wednesday ’cause your guy didn’t win? ‘The A Train ain’t running — Dole won.’ No! Nothing you can’t do.”
Threats to leave the country should be seen for what they are: acts of self-indulgence and a way of letting off steam and conveying to people that they really do not like this candidate.
But for most Americans, life will go on, more or less as it did before, no matter who wins.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
