Daniel Drezner has a post on data from several polls that talks about who the world would prefer to see as the next US President. Now the instinctive answer would be 'Barack Obama of course' and the polls seem to reflect that to some extent.
This reminds me of a conversation that I had with two Indian friends the other day. We were saying the usual foreign student things about the elections:
'man, if only we could vote', 'foreigners should be totally allowed to vote for the U.S. President' and 'Americans better get it right this time...' etc. until we started to think of what it would look like if the US President was popularly voted on by the whole world...
Now keep in mind that this was a rushed, 5 minute chat and we weren't thinking very seriously but this is what we thought:
China- would mostly vote McCain because of their economic interests and fundamentally realist world view.
India- a significant amount of people we thought would vote McCain because of the mis-guided perception that democrats = cuts on outsourcing etc. Also if the Desi lobby is anything to go by, Republicans are quite popular with rich Indian entrepreneurs (except for the ones that love Bill Clinton, but really, how could you not?)
Parts of central Asia = Also McCain because of the tougher stance on Russia? Interesting that the most support to McCain comes from Georgia.
At this point we hastily decided that it would not be a good idea after all if everyone in the world got to choose the US President and gave our blessings to the US elections in their current form...
Thoughts?
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