Manitoba and Saskatchewan had the highest level of support for Donald Trump and the lowest for Kamala Harris in a poll of who Canadians would prefer as U.S. president.
Harris had the support of the plurality of Manitoba-Saskatchewan respondents in the Environics Institute for Survey Research poll at 41 per cent, compared with 60 per cent nationally.
A total of 37 per cent of respondents in the two provinces preferred the Republican candidate, compared with 21 per cent nationally. Alberta had the second-highest level of support for Trump at 30 per cent and the second-lowest support for Harris, at 47 per cent.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at 1st Summit Arena at the Cambria County War Memorial, in Johnstown, Pa., Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Droke)
Canadians were nearly three times as likely to support Harris, who was the preferred candidate among all age and gender categories nationally, with one exception. However, support is down for Harris compared with Joe Biden in 2020, who had 67 per cent support. The proportion of Canadians who preferred Trump increased by six percentage points between 2020 and 2024, up from 15 per cent.
Environics Institute executive director Andrew Parkin said Tuesday the increase in support for Trump is more an expression of how many people are feeling disaffected than support for Trump, specifically.
“Consistently across surveys, we’ve seen the Prairies, and particularly Saskatchewan, as being the focal point of discontent for how the country’s actually working, and I would take this as another symptom of that,” he said.
“My sense of this is there’s less of a kind of … hitching up to the Trump agenda and more that this is a good way to express how dissatisfied you are with the status quo of politics and economics.”
Harris had the support of 68 per cent of women, compared with 51 per cent of male respondents. Twenty-seven per cent of male respondents support Trump, compared with 15 per cent of women.
Support for the two main candidates was tied, at 36 per cent, among men ages of 18 to 34. More than twice as many men in that age group favoured Biden over Trump in 2020, with 52 per cent and 24 per cent support, respectively.
Parkin said he doesn’t think the fact Harris is a woman has much to do with the increase in support for Trump compared with 2020.
“I don’t think that’s as big of a factor,” he said. “Despite the pandemic, in 2020, we just weren’t in as bad of a mood as we are now. I think that’s more important than the candidate, to be honest.”
A plurality of federal Conservative Party supporters preferred Trump, at 44 per cent compared with 36 per cent for Harris. Harris had between 89 and 81 per cent support among the Bloc Québécois, Liberals, NDP and Greens.
The survey, which was posted online Monday, was done in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University via landline and cellphone calls to 2,016 Canadians between Sept. 9 and Sept. 23. A sample of that size drawn from the population produces results accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples, Environics said.
Trump has improved in U.S. polls since the Canadian survey was done and recently took the lead over Harris in the betting odds for the first time since the GOP and Democratic nominees met at a debate Sept. 10.
adam.treusch@freepress.mb.ca