You know the campaign has entered the silly season (as if it ever left) when some outfit actually spends money to find out, if they were just for a miraculous moment, an American who Canadians would vote for in the U.S. presidential election. As if there aren’t enough meaningless polls already out there, U.K.-based YouGov surveyed a little over 1,000 of our neighbors to the north, and they overwhelmingly chose Barack Obama.
According to the pollsters, Obama would take 47 percent of the Canadian vote with 17 percent going to Republican candidate John McCain. What about the other 36 percent of respondents? They either said they didn’t know who they would vote for or they got all mean-assed Quebecois and refused to answer.
It is this last segment of the respondent pool that concerns me. Hey, it’s a survey, Mr. Canuck, lighten up! What could they have been thinking? That if they chose the white guy, they’d appear to be racist? That if they chose the black guy, they’d appear — what? I bet if they had to choose between Neil Diamond and Neil Young as their country’s greatest living musical export, they’d have an opinion.
But the survey findings get even more sinister:
The poll also said 36 percent of respondents agreed the U.S. was a “force for good” in the world, 34 percent of Canadians called America a “force for evil,” while the rest didn’t know.
Wait, you’re telling me that one in three Canadians doesn’t have an opinion about whether their neighbors to the south are a force for good or evil? Come on, everybody has an opinion about that. Just ask the French or the Iranians (answer: evil, really evil).
Oh, they did:
The poll showed that the U.S. was described as a force for good by 25 percent of Germans, 28 percent of French, 33 percent of the British and 49 percent of the Italians.
Thirty-five percent of the British, 40 percent of the French, 27 percent of the Italians and 39 percent of the Germans called America a force for evil.
There seems to be something wrong with these pollsters. They can’t manage to get more than 70 percent of respondents to respond except in Italy, where 75 percent expressed an opinion. Every other country had a response rate in the 60 percentile region. Something ain’t right when more than 35 percent of your pool doesn’t respond.
But at least there was some consistency in the findings. Respondents in every country polled chose Obama over McCain. How little the Europeans want a president from George Bush’s party was evident in McCain’s numbers — from a low of 6 percent in Germany to a high of 15 percent in Italy.
