How Trump's push for Canadian statehood would hurt the GOP

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : If Trump were to make a concerted pitch for Canada to become the 51st state, it would run counter to historical precedents for the politics surrounding statehood.
50% : Similarly, a September survey from The Environics Institute for Survey Research found Harris ahead of Trump 60 percent to 21 percent among Canadians.
43% : Polls inquiring about Canadian attitudes toward the 2024 U.S. presidential election demonstrated a clear preference for then-Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump.
40% : Of course, this is probably a "take Trump seriously, but not literally" situation.
36% : Assuming Canada used a winner-take-all system in the Electoral College akin to 48 of 50 states (only Maine and Nebraska don't), Canada's 52 electoral votes would have given Harris 278 overall, but Trump still would have claimed a majority with 312.
32% : Notably, even Canadians who identify with the nation's Conservative Party -- which leads in the polls for Canada's 2025 election -- wouldn't necessarily line up behind Republicans: The Leger and Environics Institute polls found that Trump led Harris among Conservative voters by a margin of only 3 to 8 percentage points.
31% : The thing is, Trump would be shooting the puck into his own net if he fought for Canada to become the 51st state.
31% : This was a downtick for Democrats from 2020, when Joe Biden led Trump 67 percent to 15 percent in the same poll, but it still represents a much stronger left-leaning preference among potential Canadian voters.
27% : Still, Canada as a state would not necessarily have allowed Harris to defeat Trump in 2024 -- although it would have made the race closer and almost certainly would have changed the popular-vote winner.
25% : In an October 2024 poll from Leger, 64 percent said they'd vote for Harris, compared with just 21 percent who said Trump.

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