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Polls: Europeans Favour Biden Over Trump by Wide Margins

Note: this article is continuously updated as additional data accumulates. If you have more data for us to include in the coverage, please send it to our team working on the story via email: [email protected].

Last updated: November 3, 2020


With the US Presidential election being only a couple of weeks away, pollsters across Europe have asked who voters favour in the race between incumbent President Donald Trump (Republican Party~ ECR) and former Vice-President Joe Biden (Democratic Party~S&D). The Democratic party is affiliated with the Social Democratic group in the European Parliament, as Democrats are a member of the Progressive Alliance, consisting of social democratic parties around the world. The Republican party is a regional partner of the national-conservative ECR in the European Parliament.

Few pollsters have asked a solid and clear hypothetical voting intention question, most notably Ipsos. Ipsos interviewed voters across the globe asking them the question: “The United States will be holding an election this November to elect a President for the next four years. If you had to vote in this election, would you vote for Republican candidate Donald Trump, or Democrat candidate Joe Biden?” In Germany, 62% responded that they would vote for Joe Biden and only 10% said the same about Donald Trump. 11% of the German sample preferred not to reveal their voting intention, and 18% did not know how to answer. If undecided voters were to be excluded from the sample, 86% of voters would vote for Joe Biden, and only 14% would vote for his Republican opponent.

The Ipsos poll showed that French voters are relatively indecisive about both candidates compared to other Western European countries. 34% would not know whom to vote for if they had the choice between Biden and Trump. 50% supported the democratic contender, only 10% expressed their desire to make their cross for Donald Trump in an election. 6% preferred not to answer the survey question. If the large pool of undecided voters in France were to be excluded, 83% would vote for Joe Biden, and only 17% would vote for Donald Trump.

Similar question in France was also asked by BVA in October. They found thatโ€”in raw numbersโ€”57 per cent of the voters would vote for Biden, while only nine per cent would vote for Trump, should they have a chance.12 per cent did not know and 22 would vote for other candidate or would not vote at all.

The Ipsos poll in Italy found that 49% of the electorate would vote for Joe Biden, 15% would vote for Donald Trump. If voters who did not express a voting intention (36%) were to be excluded, Joe Biden would lead among Italians with a 77 to 33 margin.

If voters in Spain could elect the next US President, 54% would vote for Biden. 27% of voters say that they do not know who to vote for, which is two and a half times more compared to those who would vote for Trump (11%). 9% of respondents preferred not to reveal their voting intention to Ipsos. Among decided Spaniards, Biden leads over Trump with an 83-to-17-ratio.

Poland is one of the socially more conservative European countries. This makes the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden tighter than elsewhere on the continent: Both candidates would receive 27% of the vote, Ipsos found. Logically, if the voters who don’t know who to pick from the two (40%) and those who do not want to reveal their voting intention (5%) were to be excluded, each candidate would receive 50% of the vote.

In Sweden, 73% of the Ipsos sample responded that they would vote for Joe Biden. Only 10% answered that they would favour Donald Trump in an election. 14% answered that they don’t know the answer to this question and 3% preferred not to answer. This translates into a vote share of 88% for Biden and 12% for Trump if only open and decided voters were to be considered.

Hungary has also a socially more conservative population than most European countries. However, a majority still seems to sympathize with Joe Biden. This year’s Ipsos survey found that 33% of the representative sample said that they would vote for Biden, 23% said the same thing about Donald Trump. 37% did not know what to answer, and 6% of those surveyed refused to reveal their voting intention. Hence, 59% of decided and open voters would vouch for Biden, 41% would make their cross for Trump in a hypothetical Hungarian ballot booth for the US Presidential election.

The global Ipsos poll also interviewed a representative sample of voters in Belgium. 63% said they would vote for Joe Biden, 10% would vote for Donald Trump, 21% did not know what to answer, and 6% responded that they were unsure what to answer. If only decided voters who have made up their minds were taken into consideration, Trump would receive 14%, clearly lagging behind Biden with 86%. Zooming in to the first subnational administrative level, Kieskompas surveyed voters in Flanders, Belgium’s northern region. There even 68% favoured Biden, compared with 14% who favoured Trump with, 11.9% for other candidates and 5.9% unsure of their voting preference. Again excluding undecidedsโ€”as it is not functionally possible to cast a ballot for the ‘don’t know’ party in the voting boothโ€”would yield a much similar result as in the Netherlands above, with Biden winning easily 72% to Trump’s 15%. Others, for example, Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, Green Howie Hawkins and independent Kanye West would receive 13%.

In the Netherlands the Kieskompas research institute has found that 65.6% of voters would support Joe Biden, while only 16.5% would vote for Trump, should the Dutch be eligible to vote in the election. 12% would vote for some other candidate while 6% were unsure of their opinion. Excluding undecideds (the standard way Europe Elects presents voting intention figures), the race would translate to a landslide victory for the Democratic candidate Biden, receiving 70% to Trump’s 18%, with other candidates receiving roughly 13% of the vote. An Ipsos poll that was conducted on the same topic in the Netherlands showed similar results: Joe Biden received 61%, while only 11% would vote for Donald Trump. 22% of the Ipsos sample did not know what to answer, 6% did not want to share their voting intention in the survey. If only Trump and Biden voters would be considered in this sample, the former Vice-President would receive 85%, while the incumbent would receive 15%.

In Finland, the pollster Kantar TNS found that 75% would want Democrats’ Joe Biden to win the election, while only 10% would vote for Trump, 3% for others and 12% undecided. Excluding the undecided would yield a victory of Biden with 85% to 11%, with 3% of the voters selecting another candidate. Voters of all parties favoured Biden over Trump, except for the right-wing PS-ID. Kantar’s exact question wording isn’t available and they use ‘wanting to win’ and ‘would vote’ rather interchangeably in the article, so it is not at the moment of writing exactly clear whether the poll constitutes a strict voting intention question or rather a preference for a certain candidate winning the election.

In Greece, the ProRata polling agency asked Greek voters ‘if US presidential elections were being held tomorrow, you were eligible to vote and you had to choose between the following two candidates, who would you choose?’. The pollster found that 71% would vote for Biden in an election and only 15% would vote for Trump. Those choosing ‘Don’t know’ numbered 14%, and excluding them would yield a 83-17 victory for former VP Biden. It was not possible to vote for ‘Other’ in this survey.

The pollster Ireland Thinks found that 80% of the electorate in the Irish Republic would vote for Joe Biden; only 13% would vote for Donald Trump. 7% picked don’t know when asked “If you had a vote in the upcoming US Presidential Election which of the following candidates would you vote for?”. If the latter were to be excluded from the sample, Joe Biden’s share would rise to 86%, while Donald Trump would trail behind with only 14%.

The pollster Factum Interactive found that 43% of Latvian voters would favour Joe Biden; only 13% would vote for Donald Trump if they had the choice. If other opinions were to be excluded from the study, Biden would lead with 77% over Trump, who would reach 23%.

Based on these data provided above by different pollsters with almost identical survey questions, Europe Elects projects that around 80% of decided voters in the European Union would vote for Joe Biden, while around 20% would tick the box for the incumbent US President. That is based on data weighted by voters who turned out in the EU Parliament election 2019. A shortcoming of the estimate is that it only covers 83.6% of the EU electorate and that the pollsters ignored or excluded third-party candidates in almost all cases. It does not include the voting intention of adults living in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

And to draw a full circle, Dalia Research, conducting the poll for Bertelsmann Stiftung, has polled a whole representative sample of 27 EU member states about the matter. With a sample of 13,080 people across the EU countries, Dalia Research found out that 45 per cent of the respondents would vote for Joseph Biden, should they be given a chanceโ€”against Donald Trump’s 17 per cent. 38 per cent would vote ‘neither’, which could be interpreted as either another candidate or not voting at all. Excluding that, it would be a 73-27 advantage for Biden, the democratic party’s candidate in the race. Such exclusion would, however, not be completely accurate as the others and nonvoters are enmeshed in one column.


Tying it all to a knot, below are the tabulated results presented above. In summary, the various European nations polled indicate that the Democratsโ€™ candidate Joe Biden would be vastly favoured in Europe to the Republicansโ€™ Donald Trump. Weโ€™ll be continuing to update the article as new relevant data comes in.

Explicit hypothetical voting intention (excluding undecided voters)

CountryBiden (%)Trump (%)Other (%)Pollster
Belgium8614Ipsos
Belgium (Flanders)721513Kieskompas
Finland85113Kantar TNS
France8317Ipsos
Germany8614Ipsos
Greece8317ProRata
Hungary5941Ipsos
Ireland8614Ireland Thinks
Italy7723Ipsos
Italy5347Noto
Latvia7723Factum Interactive
Netherlands8515Ipsos
Netherlands701813Kieskompas
Poland5050Ipsos
Spain8317Ipsos
Sweden8812Ipsos
Russia (not in EU)3368Ipsos
Turkey (not in EU)5347Ipsos
UK (not in EU)8119Ipsos

This aggregation was assembled by collaboration of many Europe Elects team members, including Tobias Gerhard Schminke, Euan Healey, Polychronis Karampelas, Celso Gomes and Julius Lehtinen

On top of the continuous edits to add new data, an earlier version of the article was not up to our standards of consistency, transparency and quality, which we have now corrected. Although there was no error in the polling results of the pollsters, we mistakenly initially reported numbers on another question in the instance of Netherlands. We want to ensure our unique work and aggregation on European polling and voting intentions is as transparent and verifiable as possible, and all work presented in this article should now be replicable from the sources cited.

We have also streamlined the article and stripped if ot more vague polling questions about who do Europeans want to win the race, as the polling on explicit hypothetical voting intention has accumulated.

20 Comments

Where are we? Aren’t we full-bloodied members of EU? Or just poor cousins, village idiots, whose opinions NEVER counts for anything in the halls of Brussels? I’m Czech, but the rest of Visegrad-four, and the Baltics, where is our voice? I fhink if you poll us, we would rightously give TRUMP (his children speak czech!) 80% and thet demented corrupt hick BIDEN 20 %!

Please leave the EU. Now.
This is a peace treaty build on joint values, which you Videgraders refuse to share.

The post says on it that there is no data available yet for several countries, one of which includes Czech Republic.

I am also Czech. And you, Oldo, are the reason why people say and think things like Winulf Behrend above. Truth be told we would probably vote similarly to above mentioned EU countries and there is no chance Trump would get 80 % in the Czech Republic.

Czech Republic belongs to the EU and I hope we will finally prove it when we vote out current MP Babis.

Btw. we have the same voice in the Brussels as other member state. We only refuse to use it productively. That is not fault of the EU, that is our fault.

I do not like Babis but I have to admit that he is not against EU. Other thing are his voters mainly uneducated people from villages and towns – the part of the part of the country that still not yet recovered from communist collectivization of agriculture.

You are the biggest jack ass for saying this! I live over here in the United States and we are living in hell with Trump as president. He is awful, he is selfish crooked and incompetent. His failure to act on the pandemic in January has cost over 230,000 Americans their lives, and more will needlessly die before we actually turn the corner. He has done nothing for us and he only cares about himself. Shame on you for supporting Trump, we are sending him packing next week!

There is a fault with the Dutch polls. The research found that among the Dutch, 66% of the people agrees with Joe Biden and 30% with Trump. They would not acutally vote with that percentages. The research was looking on how much people agree with the candidate. That doesnt mean 66 percent would vote Biden, but in general, 66 percent agreed with the points of Biden. Sorry for the blurry explanation of me, I hope I cleared it more out. Sorry for my English.

Here the article in Dutch:
https://www.ad.nl/buitenland/nederlander-is-het-voor-30-procent-eens-met-trump-en-66-procent-met-biden~aa8fb68b/

I think that Europe and the UK have a clearer perspective of the American circus and can give a more honest unbiased opinion. I think the world will breathe a collective sigh of relief with Trump in the rear view mirror. Biden will reach out to our allies, get America back on track with Climate issues, and make sane policies for a safer world.

What about th rest of the European union? This poll makes you think only the countries known to be in disfavor of trump anyway

It seems like you didn’t use the poll from the Netherlands correctly: it says that on average Dutch people agree with 30% of the ideas of Trump (and 66% with those of Biden). But what the Dutch people would actually vote is: %16.5 would vote for Trump and %65.6 would vote for Biden (so in your comparison with countries this would be 0.656/(0.656+0.165)=0.80 in favour of Biden.

Yo estoy con Trump y creo que esta encuesta esta manipulada ya que mucha gente votarรญa a Trump a yes que al corrupto pedofilo Biden que encima a estafado a sus propios ciudadanos haciendo negocios turbios con el PCCH. PREFIERO MIL VECES QUE GANE TRUMP YA QUE ESTร EN JUEGO LA LIBERTAD DEL MUNDO. SOY ESPAร‘OL Y LO PREFIERO

I think than in UK much more people than 13% support Trump. His support should correlate with percentage of supporters of Brexit in population which is around 40-50%.

Ladies & gentlemen,
WE are EUROPEANS and WE DON’T VOTE IN AMERICA (USA) ! WE have our own Trumps&Bidens here, among us !
The Americans know which is better for them !!

stfu no body wants to listen to yo dumb ass. Just your scentence alone is the reason no one listens to you…………….tf?