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TOP STORY
A new poll finds that Donald Trump isn’t just more popular among Canadians than their own prime minister, but he’s one of Canada’s favourite Republican presidential candidates ever.
A survey published Monday by the Environics Institute found that if Canadians were allowed to decide the U.S. presidential election, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris would win by 60 per cent.
Canadians always favour the Democrat in these types of polls, but Trump’s 21 per cent makes him more popular among Canadians than any other Republican presidential candidate of the last two decades, easily besting more moderate contenders such as Mitt Romney and John McCain.
It also means that about as many Canadians would vote for Trump as would vote for their own prime minister. The Liberal party under Justin Trudeau is currently charting in the low-20s in opinion polls, with an Abacus Data poll from last week putting them at 22 per cent.
And the Environics numbers are particularly unprecedented when it comes to youth sentiment. Trump’s strongest base of Canadian support was found to be among voters under the age of 34.
The 18-34 demographic backed Trump by 28 per cent, more than double the 13 per cent of Canadian senior citizens in the Trump camp.
And among under-34 men, the results were tied: 36 per cent for Trump, 36 per cent for Harris.
This fits in with a wider trend showing that Canadian youth are increasingly more politically conservative than their elders.
The Conservative party under Pierre Poilievre similarly counts its strongest base of support among youth voters.
And a similar trend has emerged in the B.C. election; voters go to the polls on Saturday. Although it may have reversed in the election’s final stretch, polls from late September showed the B.C. Conservatives doing best among voters 18-34. On Sept. 23, Leger pollsters found 46 per cent of under-34 voters intended to vote B.C. Conservative, against just 43 per cent who intended to vote NDP.
This is a relatively recent trend. Only a few years ago, Canada adhered to the traditional dynamic of young people favouring progressives, with older people favouring conservatives.
This is probably why Trump is charting dramatically higher among Canadian youth than when Environics conducted a similar poll during the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Back then, just 18 per cent of Canadians under 34 favoured Trump; 10 points lower than the current total.
Surveys of how Canadians would vote in U.S. elections have only really been around since the 1990s, but Republicans have usually struggled to captured double-digit support among Canadians.
In 1996, an Angus Reid poll found just 11 per cent of Canadians supported Republican nominee Bob Dole against the incumbent Bill Clinton.
The two presidential elections contested by Barack Obama resulted in similar blowouts among Canadians. In 2008, a Harris/Decima survey found Obama leading 66 per cent to 13 per cent among Canadians against McCain. In 2012, a Forum Research poll commissioned by National Post found Obama leading 78 per cent to 12 per cent against challenger Romney.
The 2012 Forum poll was broken down by age demographics, but support for Obama was so overwhelming that its difficult to parse any real differences. Even Conservatives favoured Obama by a landslide 59 per cent.
That kind of cross-partisan unanimity was definitely gone in the most recent Environics poll, which was first reported by the Globe and Mail. Liberals supported Harris by 85 to 8. Among Conservatives, Trump actually won by a plurality of 44 per cent against 36 per cent for Harris.
While it seems natural that Conservatives would back the right-winger, this is actually pretty rare. Republican candidates generally do better among Canadian Conservative voters in these polls, but they don’t usually win outright.
The closest this has previously come to happening was in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. An Environics poll from that year found Republican nominee (and eventual winner) George W. Bush pulling down a respectable 29 per cent among Canadians against the 48 per cent going for Democratic nominee Al Gore.
The Environics survey showed Bush narrowly winning among supporters of the Progressive Conservatives (46 Bush, 41 Gore), but losing among supporters of the Canadian Alliance (39 Bush, 44 Gore), the successor to the populist Reform Party.
Three years later, the PCs and the Alliance merged to form the modern Conservative party.
Meanwhile, Bush’s unusual lustre among Canadians held up into the 2004 election. Although Canada had been a strong opponent of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, a 2004 Ipsos Poll found Bush polling at 22 per cent among Canadian voters against the 60 per cent who would vote for John Kerry.
So, effectively the same Democrat/Republican ratio as Canadian sentiments for the current U.S. presidential race.
IN OTHER NEWS
The Trudeau government has been talking a big game lately about curbing immigration, whether it’s a pledge to slash the number of student visas handed out or Immigration Minister Marc Miller expressing “alarm” at the thousands of suspicious asylum claims coming in. But none of this is doing anything to slow down immigration. In fact, it remains higher than ever. In just two-and-a-half months, Canada has added 227,000 new people. For context, in the last year of the Harper government Canada brought in 250,000 immigrants total — and even that was breaking records at the time.
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