Tick of distant approval for Joe Biden

If Donald Trump’s fate rested on the support of Australian voters, he would be unceremoniously thrown from office next week, new polling shows.

Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden in Coconut Creek, Florida. Picture: AFP

If Donald Trump’s fate rested on the support of Australian voters, he would be unceremoniously thrown from office next week, new polling shows.

Survey data collected by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney suggests that, across virtually every demographic and political group in Australia, Democratic candidate Joe Biden is overwhelmingly preferred over the US President.

Two polls — one this month and another in July last year — show Australian men and ­Coalition voters are more likely to back Mr Trump than woman and Labor voters, but even among those groups, support for Mr Biden exceeds that for Mr Trump by double-digit margins.

The surveys reveal support among Australians for the Democratic candidate has firmed, rising from 41 per cent to 49 per cent. Support for Mr Trump rose from 20 per cent in July last year to 23 per cent in the latest poll, leaving him behind Mr Biden by a more than 2:1 ratio in the eyes of Australian voters.

The polls, with samples of 1619 and 1820 Australians ­respectively, reveal the only identifiable Australian groups who support Mr Trump’s re-election are minor-party supporters and non-voters.

However, a sizeable proportion of Australian prefer ­neither candidate: 13 per cent want someone other than Mr Trump or Mr Biden to become president, while 15 per cent have no preference.

Australian men are almost twice as likely to support Mr Trump than Australian women, at 30 per cent to 17 per cent. But both groups prefer Mr Biden, with 52 per cent of women and 45 per cent of men backing the Democratic candidate.

Nearly a third of Liberal and Nationals voters prefer Mr Trump, compared to 13 per cent of Labor voters. But 41 per cent of Coalition supporters, and 62 per cent of Labor voters, say they want Mr Biden to win next week’s election.

Writing in The Weekend Australian, the US centre’ Shaun Ratcliff and Simon Jackman said while Australians clearly favoured Mr Biden over Mr Trump, the popularity of a US president outside the US was an important lever of American statecraft and alliance management.

“Four more years of Trump will test the robustness of the bipartisan support for the Australian-US relationship, even as the US alliance remains paramount to Australian national security,” they write.

“If he wins, Biden will be a ­reassuring figure to the Australian public and many in Canberra, who will welcome a restoration of convention in ­alliance management and less hostility to multilateral fora.

“The irony could be that like Obama, Biden is a relatively popular president, but disappoints the strategic affairs community if US strategic ambitions for the Indo-Pacific are not fully realised.”