President Donald Trump has big ambitions for the United States in the world. Aside from his focus on tariffs and the immigration, Trump seems to have expansion on his mind as he looks at erasing the border between Canada and the U.S., and expanding territorial lines north to Greenland.
While Trump has so far maintained his popularity with the Republican base in Utah, they don’t seem to have his same vision on changing the lines on the world map, according to the latest polling from the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, conducted by HarrisX.
How do Utahns feel about U.S. expansion to Canada?
Trump has been candid about his dreams of erasing the line between the U.S. and Canada.
Four days after his inauguration into his second term in the White House, he said, “I would love to see Canada be the 51st state.”
His sales pitch to the Canadians was simple: “The Canadian citizens, if that happened, would get a very big tax cut — a tremendous tax cut,” Trump said at the time during a briefing for Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Trump listed other benefits like better health coverage for Americans and combined military defense.
Back in December, Trump went so far as to call former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the “governor … of the Great State of Canada” in a Truth Social post. He hasn’t leveled the same insult at newly sworn in Prime Minister Mark Carney.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt maintained the president is firm on his position of Canada “becoming the 51st state” at a press conference earlier this month.
The cracks Trump’s position has cause in the historic alliance between the two neighbors is evident. Carney recently said his country has to forge a new path forward.
“There is no going back. We in Canada will have to build a new relationship with the United States,” he said.
Former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Jeff Flake recently told the Deseret News that it’s important to be aligned with American allies and criticized the language used by the Trump White House.
“Canadians love Americans, we love Canadians — we’ll work it out,” he added. “But some of the rhetoric is just unnecessary — the 51st state and things like that.”
Flake traveled to Canada with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox earlier this month in the hopes of securing business partnerships for Utah.
According to the Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll, Utahns agree with Flake that they see Canada as an ally and not a potential new state.
When asked what they think of the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state, nearly 7 in 10 Utah voters said they were strongly or somewhat opposed. Only 32% of voters said they either strongly or somewhat support the proposal.
Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, said, “Most Utahns see the suggestion of Canada becoming the 51st state as unnecessary and even disruptive to a friendly relationship with an important ally.”
Opposition to the idea crossed party lines, with 58% of Republican-identifying Utahns in opposition compared to 81% of Democrats and 78% of independents.
The poll was conducted by HarrisX Interactive from April 9-12 of 800 registered Utah voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points.
Nearly 7 out of 10 of the surveyed voters said they believe the U.S. is creating unnecessary pressure with Canada. Again, only 32% said they believed it’s a fair goal for Canada to join the U.S.
The Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll also asked whether they support applying pressure on Canada to become the 51st state.
A strong majority, 84%, said they were against applying any type of pressure on Canada about statehood. Roughly 3% said they support applying military pressure while 13% backed using economic and political tactics to pressure Canada.
Matthew Burbank, a political science professor at the University of Utah, told the Deseret News of the findings, “What you’re mostly seeing is that people in Utah are not particularly convinced about those reasons or where this is going, or that it seems to be part of any broader strategy.”
Do Utahns approve of U.S. pressure on Greenland?
Besides Canada, Trump also has his heart set on buying Greenland, a goal he has had since his first term in office. These plans quickly resurfaced in his second term.
“We need Greenland for national security and international security,” Trump said from the Oval Office late last month.
“So we’ll, I think, we’ll go as far as we have to go,” he continued. “We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we’ll see what happens. But if we don’t have Greenland, we can’t have great international security.”
The Trump administration is concerned about Chinese and Russian efforts in the Arctic Ocean. The two nations have conducted joint military exercises and made investments in new weapons while ramping up their presence in the northernmost region in recent years. In addition to being mineral-rich, the Arctic area holds strategic value because of the transit routes that flow through it, as Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told NPR last month.
Despite the value that Greenland holds, Utahns aren’t receptive to the strategic takeover of the country that Trump suggests.
As Burbank stated, the U.S. could have expressed its interests in a diplomatic sit-down with Greenland and Denmark officials. “That’s not the way President Trump approached this and I think that’s in a large way leaving a sour taste for people,” he said.
About three-fifths of Utah voters, or 58%, said they somewhat or strongly oppose the idea of Greenland becoming a territory of the U.S., according to the latest Deseret News poll.
Meanwhile, 42% said they somewhat or strongly support the proposal.
But Republicans in Utah displayed slightly more support for Greenland becoming a territory of the U.S., with around 62% saying they somewhat or strongly support the idea, compared to 13% of Democrats and 23% of independents.
Polling out of Greenland suggests reluctance in joining the U.S.
When asked whether they think Greelanders want to join the U.S., 73% of Utahns said they do not, while 27% said they do.
Here, Republican-identifying voters were aligned with Democratic and independent survey respondents.
In another question, Utah voters were asked what kind of pressure they would be comfortable applying on Greenland in pursuit of it becoming a U.S. territory.
At least 16% said they supported economic and political interventions, while 6% said they backed military pressure.
Overall, roughly 8 in 10 voters — or 78% — said they don’t want the U.S. to apply any pressure on Greenland.
It’s worth noting that 23% of Republican-identifying voters are in favor of economic and political pressure and only 7% approved of military pressure.
Perry said that although some Utahns are interested in expanding the union with Canada and Greenland, “when asked about specific policies, voters show they are incredibly skeptical of applying any sort of pressure.”
University of Utah’s Burbank added that despite Utah being an overwhelmingly Republican state, there isn’t “a whole lot of support for these ideas” of the U.S. taking over Canada or Greenland.
