Slight traces of Trumpism in Canada
I always pay attention when I hear from Greg Lyle, a former pollster for Kim Campbell and Mike Harris whose Innovative Research Group does thoughtful research into the motivation behind political choices.
When Justin Trudeau’s Liberals started to pull out of the rough three-way tie that characterized the middle stretch of the 2015 election, Lyle spotted the trend and calculated its amplitude earlier than most of his competitors.
But Lyle is less interested in predicting horse-race outcomes than in understanding why voters behave as they do. His latest study asks 1,016 online respondents in the United States about attitudes that may drive support for Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy.
At the same time, he questioned 2,574 respondents in Canada to measure how much welcome views that resembles those of Trump supporters are here.
Many of Lyle’s findings comfort the notion that the rise of a Trumplike figure couldn’t happen here. Asked whether they agree with the simple proposition, “Donald Trump scares me,” 72 per cent of Canadian respondents agreed strongly or somewhat, compared to only 52 per cent of U.S. respondents. On a test of limited or conditional support for Trump — “He may not always express himself in the best way, but I generally agree with most of what Donald Trump says” — only 20 per cent of Canadians agreed, against 44 per cent of Americans.
Take Trump’s name out of it, however and responses were often closer. Forty-two per cent of Canadians and 49 per cent of Americans, agreed with a statement expressing suspicion about immigrants: “The growing number of newcomers from other countries threaten traditional (Canadian or American) customs and values.” In contrast, Canadians were likelier than Americans to agree that “the growing number of newcomers from other countries strengthens” their society, by 46 per cent to 35 per cent, but the contrast was hardly night and day.
Comparing Canadian and American attitudes, however, is secondary to Lyle’s main goal, which is to understand why those Americans who vote for Trump on Tuesday will do so. He polled on a range of opinions, from approval of Barack Obama’s White House record to views on the economy law and order, same-sex marriage, and racial minorities. He found that only a fraction of U.S. respondents have “very unfavourable” attitudes toward Muslims and recent immigrants, but that within that small group, 61 per cent plan to vote for Trump, compared to 18 per cent for Clinton.
But for all that, Lyle is less sure that these dark undercurrents of opinion are driving most of the Trump vote. He ran a series of regression analyses on his results, to a standard statistical technique to see which correlations are most likely to drive votes. What he found is that the greatest driver of Trump’s support is the simple fact that he’s the Republican in a race where not everyone is going to vote for the Democrat.
“For all the talk of building a wall, banning Muslims and ‘nasty women,’ we can explain most of Trump’s support with the standard underlying drivers that matter in any election,” Lyle said.
So 43 per cent of Trump’s support comes from party identification: Republican voters are highly likely to be planning to vote for Trump. Another 28 per cent of his support is driven by reactions to Obama’s record: If you think Obama is an ineffectual or disastrous president, you’re quite likely to support Trump.
“Most of Trump’s support can be explained by the same fundamental forces that drove Mitt Romney’s support or John McCain’s support,” Lyle said, referring to the last two GOP nominees.
Lyle found that another 11 per cent of Trump’s support comes from what he calls “populism and alienation,” which pops up in answers to questions about whether politics is too complicated, everything is changing too fast, the good old ways are gone and the bad new ways will be worse.
“Finally, we come to the values evoked by comments such as the ban on Muslims entering the U.S., and the wall with Mexico,” Lyle said. He asked questions about several different ethnic minority groups; “only attitudes toward Muslims emerge as a key driver of the vote in this election, and that only explains 5 per cent of the Trump vote.”
That’s 5 per cent more than I’d like to have driving anyone’s vote for president. And I have a hunch I’ll be hearing from a lot of readers who don’t buy Lyle’s analysis. But here again, the U.S. attitude finds echoes in Canada: “Canadians are twice as negative towards Muslims as they are to any other minority. In this one element we may see echoes of the Trump campaign in Canada,” Lyle said. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
43 per cent of Trump’s support comes from party identification: Republican voters are highly likely to be planning to vote for Trump