Every US citizens who casts a vote (around 130 million voters), is also casting a proxy vote for over 50 other citizens of planet Earth (all 7 billion of us). As an international Kossack, I can assure you that the rest of the world is watching with both hope and fear as US Presidents tend to have large impacts on the rest of the world. Put another way, in terms of the citizens that your vote counts for, you personally represent about 2% of the constituency you’ll be proxy voting for.
So, if you want to make an informed vote on behalf of the rest of us let me offer the following results of global polling on which candidate we’d prefer...
Pew conducts a Global Spring assessment that includes global attitudes to US politics. In their survey of 20,132 non-US citizens conducted in April/May 2016 they uncovered a pretty striking pattern:
- 9% of Europeans have confidence that Donald Trump would be a potentially positive President for the rest of the world. 59% have confidence in Hillary Clinton.
- China: 22% of citizens expressed confidence in Trump. Clinton got 37%.
- Canada: 14% expressed confidence in Trump. 60% for Clinton.
- Japan: 9% for Trump. 70% for Clinton.
Those figures hold up well in a subsequent survey taken in August.
YouGov also polled world opinion using a slightly different methodology and found that the most pro-Clinton and anti-Trump country of the 20 they surveyed was, unsurprisingly, Mexico.
In both these surveys, the only country in the world where Trump polled ahead was Russia.
However, to give respect to both large countries and small, some of us who are sensitive about the ‘small country issue’ would add that once the sample size was increased to include 50 countries, our dear friends in Portugal are the most pro-Clinton (85%) and anti-Trump (5%) citizens in the world! That +80 margin just eclipses Finland (86/7 +79%). That should probably deserve toasting with a nice glass of port on November 8th.
Even that poll of 50 countries left out my own homeland of New Zealand… Not to be outdone, a local polling company asked the question of Kiwis and we obliged, responding that a respectable 76% of us support Clinton and only 9% support Trump (with that support concentrated among the membership of NZ’s only anti-immigration party called New Zealand First — happily only a very small party!).
Even more important was that pro-Clinton and anti-Trump sentiment in New Zealand just eclipsed the same polling among our cousins in Australia (Clinton 70%, Trump 11%).
Bear that subtle, but crucial, difference in mind when you are lying awake at night wondering where you might emigrate to if Trump wins. Or maybe you should just channel some Portugese political sentiment and drink a glass of port before voting, and especially after as all 7 Billion of us get to celebrate the result.