OTTAWA - A new poll suggests Canadians would root en masse for whichever leading Democrat winds up facing the Republicans in this year's U.S. presidential election.
The Canadian Press/Harris Decima survey suggests Canadians so overwhelmingly favour the Democrats, it barely matters whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton win Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.
The better-known Clinton is Canadians' favourite candidate for president but Obama still trounces the Republicans for the affection of Canadians, the survey suggests.
Respondents said they felt closer to the Democrats by a 4-to-1 margin - and even those who called themselves Conservatives appeared to reject the Republicans.
The survey, provided exclusively to The Canadian Press, said 49 per cent of Canadians expressed a fondness for the Democrats while only 12 per cent did the same for Republicans.
Pollster Bruce Anderson says the numbers suggest the Republicans have almost zero support among Canadians who describe themselves as centrist voters.
He says the number of Canadians who characterize themselves as right-wing voters is just above 15 per cent, while a similar number are self-described left-wingers and the big majority say they're in the middle.
He says the Republican constituency in Canada is limited to the thin wedge on the right wing.
"That number looks pretty similar," said Anderson, Harris Decima's president and CEO.
"What it really tells us is that everybody else who says that they're on the centre of the spectrum - or on the left of the spectrum - is lined up behind the Democrats."
Perhaps most surprisingly, the poll says the Republican party would get creamed even in a hypothetical election in which only Canadian Conservatives voted.
Even self-described Conservatives - who are supposedly more ideologically in tune with the Republicans - favoured the Democrats by a 47 per cent to 23 per cent margin.
Voters in New Hampshire will pick their preferred Democratic and Republican candidates in Tuesday's primary.
Although Democrat Barack Obama appears to have all the momentum in New Hampshire, Canadian respondents favoured Hillary Clinton by 34 per cent to 23 per cent margin over the upstart Illinois senator.
Anderson says Obama's name recognition has grown exponentially among Canadians over the last year and suggested his support is likely growing.
"As of this moment, Hillary Clinton still looks like the favourite," Anderson said.
"I guess the big question mark around all these numbers is, how much have they been moving just in the last couple of weeks?"
Obama was most popular among men, younger voters, NDP supporters and British Columbians.
Among Republican candidates, Canadian respondents favoured the most socially liberal one.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had the support of six per cent of respondents, followed by John McCain at three per cent, Mike Huckabee at two per cent and Mitt Romney at one per cent.
In a hypothetical presidential election between Obama and Romney, respondents favoured Obama 49 per cent to 11. And if only Conservatives voted, Obama would still have won by a 50-17 margin.
The telephone poll of 1,000 respondents was conducted Jan. 3-6, and has a plus or minus 3.1-percentage-point margin of error, 19 times out of 20.
