250
OTTAWA — If you're asking Canadians, it doesn't seem to matter much who wins Tuesday's New Hampshire primaries.
A new poll suggests Canadians so massively favour the U.S. Democratic party that they'd back any of its leading candidates in a presidential race against a Republican.
The Harris-Decima survey suggests the Democrats would trounce the Republicans by a four-to-one margin if the voters were Canadian.
U.S. President George W. Bush's Republican party would get creamed even in a hypothetical election in which only Canadian Conservatives voted.
The survey, provided exclusively to The Canadian Press, says 49 per cent of Canadians expressed a preference for Democrats while only 12 per cent did the same for Republicans.
Even self-described Conservatives — who are supposedly more ideologically in tune with the right-leaning Republicans — favoured the Democrats by a 47-23 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 entering the vote, Canadian respondents favoured Hillary Clinton by 34-23 margin over Mr. Obama's upstart candidacy.
Among Republican candidates, Canadian respondents favoured the most socially liberal one.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had the support of 6 per cent of respondents, followed by John McCain at 3 per cent, Mike Huckabee at 2 per cent and Mitt Romney at 1 per cent.
In a hypothetical presidential election between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, respondents favoured Mr. Obama 49 per cent to 11. And if only Conservatives voted, Mr. Obama would still have won by a 50-17 margin.
The 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.
