Canada backs Clinton, poll finds
Widespread support for Democrat
If Canadians were deciding the next U.S. president, Hillary Clinton would win by the largest landslide in the country’s history, according to a new poll surveying Canadian attitudes toward U.S. politics.
And if Canadians had their pick of presidential nominees, Calgary-born Senator Ted Cruz would be one of their last choices for the Republican party, reads the Mainstreet Research survey commissioned by Postmedia.
Were Clinton to stand as the Democratic presidential nominee against Republican Jeb Bush, 72 per cent of Canadians surveyed said they would vote for the former first lady.
Another 11 per cent were “not sure,” leaving only 16 per cent of voters backing the former Florida governor.
By contrast, the largest share of the popular vote ever managed in a reallife U.S. election was 61.05 per cent, when incumbent president Lyndon Johnson trounced Republican challenger Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Not only would Canadian voters inaugurate another President Clinton, it didn’t seem to matter who she ran against.
Were Clinton to run against Bush, Cruz or even billionaire Donald Trump, Canadian voters would return virtually the same result.
Overall, Cruz did very poorly in the survey, despite being the only contender with direct ties to the Great White North.
Cruz was born in Calgary to an American mother, but renounced his Canadian citizenship earlier this year as he prepared to make a bid for the U.S. presidency.
Of the choices for Republican presidential candidate, Canadians ranked Cruz near the bottom, with Marco Rubio, Bush, Rand Paul and Trump all enjoying higher levels of support. This was in spite of the fact that both Bush and Trump enjoyed whirlwind disapproval among respondents, with Trump in particularly currying a 65 per cent “unfavourable” rating.
The Mainstreet survey — which contacted a random sample of 2,511 Canadians on June 29 — also found Canadians wildly in support of incumbent U.S. President Barack Obama. Fully 75 per cent of respondents expressed “total approval” for the 44th president.
Recent U.S. polls, meanwhile, put Obama’s approval rating at about 50 per cent — a two-year peak high following a week of policy victories for the president, including a Supreme Court ruling establishing same-sex marriage as a legal right.
Canadians are much less enchanted with the government they actually get to vote for. In a June EKOS poll, the Conservatives were found to have only 29.2 per cent of the vote, compared to 31.3 per cent for the NDP.
Canadians are likely not alone in their love for Clinton.
Since at least the 1990s, Democratic presidential candidates are routinely favoured over Republicans by foreign populations.
In 2012, a BBC World Service survey of 21 countries found that 20 would favour Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, with the strongest support coming from Australia, Canada and the U.K., all of whom are currently governed by right-leaning parties.
Since Confederation in 1867, Canada has traditionally held more liberal political views than its neighbour to the south. Canada has tighter gun laws, ushered in universal health care in the 1960s, and brought in countrywide same-sex marriage in 2006. Perhaps most notably — at least to Americans — Canada also opposed U.S.-championed conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq.
The ideological divide along the 49th parallel was famously illustrated in 2008 by satirist Jon Stewart, who was describing the recent Canadian federal election on a broadcast of the Daily Show.
The Tories had just won a minority government victory, and Stewart quipped that a Canadian conservative party was ideologically equivalent to “Gay Nader Fans for Peace” in the United States.
Canadians and Americans do concur however, when it comes to selecting “the economy” as the chief problem facing the United States.
On that question, the Mainstreet poll matched the results of a similar Gallup poll of U.S. citizens conducted in March.
However, Canadians differed sharply from their American cousins when it came to immigration and race. Only three per cent of Canadians thought immigration was the most pressing U.S. problem, compared to seven per cent of Americans.
Conversely, 17 per cent of Canadians said the United States’ worst problem was “racism,” while “race relations” scored a meagre three per cent in Gallup data.