The United States elects a new president on Tuesday 5 November. The outcome, of course, interests also elsewhere in the world due to the resulting choice having sizeable ramifications for the rest of the world too. The United States does not exist in a vacuum.
Many pollsters have asked in various European nations what does their populace think of the race and who would they, should they have the right to do so, vote.
Below is an aggregation of voting intention polls by country that were collected during the last month. They are transformed so that they discount those who responded being unsure, for standardisation purposes. In case there were multiple polls in a country within the specified time-frame, a straightforward average of them was used. The polls below are strictly about a hypothetical voting intention on the lines of ‘If you were to vote in the American election for President, who would you vote for?’.
The Democratic Party—with Kamala Harris as their candidate—is a member of the Progressive Alliance together with the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Their youth wing is also a member of the International Federation of Liberal Youth together with the youth wing of liberal European political party ALDE (RE). As such, we are colouring her the combination of S&D red and RE yellow we use in our coverage.
The Republican Party—with Donald Trump as their candidate–is an official global partner of the national-conservative European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR). We are colouring him as the ECR colour of dark blue that we use in our coverage.
As has been the case in recent years, most of western and especially northern Europe would vote for candidate of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, with wide margins. At the other end of the scale are Russia, Serbia, Georgia and Hungary, who would vote for Donald Trump of the Republican Party if offered a chance. The numbers of above visualisation are from opinion polling on the question with standardisation done by Europe Elects, by considering only those who answered the question and hence removing those being undecided.
Voting intention is the most-asked question and a most comparable one across countries. Some pollsters have, however, opted to ask about preference: who would they want to win the race, who would be a better president from [our country]’s perspective, and so on. As these questions definitely are not comparable with the voting intention polling, we are keeping them separate.
The same effect holds true for the more vague category of questions regarding the election. The pattern is clearly visible with respondents in Finland and Netherlands preferring Harris comfortably, while the opposite is true for Serbia.
For maximum transparency, you can see every poll regarding the subject that Europe Elects has collected in Europe here, including earlier ones from up to July. If there are glaring omissions with recent surveys or if some relevant poll has slipped our radar, you can contact us by email here.
