Brits prefer Obama to Romney - that's not surprising

I've got a quick piece on the Opinium blog on a poll we ran showing that people in the UK think a Barack Obama win would be better than a Mitt Romney win in the US election:

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Although polls in the US predict that Barack Obama will be re-elected, albeit by a smaller margin than in 2008, if those of us in the UK were able to vote then the result would be an overwhelming Obama landslide.

Our latest Opinium/Observer poll showed that 59% of GB adults thought that an Obama victory would be best for Britain compared with just 6% choosing Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

This isn’t really that surprising though as people in Britain (and the rest of the world) have preferred the Democratic Party’s candidate to the Republican Party’s candidate for the past two elections.

In 2008 a Guardian/ICM poll showed that 53% of British respondents would choose Barack Obama and just 11% would choose Republican John McCain (36% had no opinion). A BBC World Service poll of 22,500 people in 22 countries showed that 49% preferred then-Senator Obama to just 12% who preferred McCain. Interestingly the margin in the UK was similar to the 2012 Opinium poll with 59% of Britons favouring Obama and just 9% choosing McCain

In 2004 when Republican George W. Bush ran for re-election against Senator John Kerry, a poll conducted by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers found that 50% of Brits backed John Kerry and just 22% would back George Bush.

The implication would seem to be that Brits (and the world generally) prefer Democratic Party candidates to Republican Party candidates as they have done for this election and the two before it.

However, it’s much more difficult to find comparable polls in the 2000 Bush vs. Al Gore election or any before that (if anyone has examples do let us know) which makes it hard to work out whether Brits just happen to like Obama and dislike Bush or whether there is a more general preference for the Democratic party over the Republican party.

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On that last point, the key bit of data that would help this would be if we had any polls for the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

I have little doubt that polls in 1996 would have shown a preference for Bill Clinton as he was a popular president abroad generally (and remains so) and also incumbent presidents will have far higher name recognition outside the US than any challenger (people I know still refer to him as Mick Romney). But the 2000 election should balance these factors. Al Gore was not the most charismatic man (he's loosened up since then) and Bush, though he later became toxically unpopular, was seen as broadly harmless. Polls on the UK's view of that election should have been a bit more balanced than in the years mentioned above.

My suspicion (though I don't have data to support this) is that Democrats are generally more popular outside the US than Republicans and there are three main reasons for this:

• The centre of gravity in US politics is further to the right than the UK and much further than most major European countries. Therefore the mainstream left in America is further right than the mainstream right wing in Europe. (This is a little simplistic and there are other dimensions but I'm keeping this short)
• A variation of the first point is that the policy positions that Brits and Europeans find strange about the US (very high religious involvement, lack of gun control, no state healthcare provision etc) are generally held and advocated more by Republicans than Democrats and are certainly more publicised. Millions of Democrats probably hold extreme views but only those of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are given much attention
• In foreign policy Republicans tend to sound more bellicose and aggressive than Democrats and, as with the more extreme domestic policies, these are areas where the rest of the world tends to resent America generally. Obama has escalated the "drone war" in Pakistan but is seen as the peaceful antidote to Bush because he doesn't go around saying things like "Bring 'em on" or "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists"

It's just a theory though and I'd be open to any data that helps prove or disprove this and of course that illusive 2000 election poll if there is one.