Canada as hypothetical 51st state would be ‘nightmare’ for Trump

As Canadians head to the polls to choose their next government, their boisterous neighbor to the south - President Donald Trump - has dominated the conversation.

Trump’s tariff wars, including hundreds of billions of dollars in duties on Canadian imports, took center stage in the debates between the party leaders. And Trump set an entirely new, confrontational tone with the longtime ally by repeatedly boasting that he wanted to make Canada the 51st U.S. state.

While the trade battle is very real, the annexation talk has been largely dismissed as typical Trump bluster, a threat meant to throw allies and enemies off their game.

There is no indication Canada would ever want to join the United States. Recent polls show Canadians vehemently opposed to the idea. But some of the smartest analysts of Canadian politics took up my request to analyze the hypothetical impact if America’s neighbor to the north decided to join.

“This would be a Democratic dream and a Republican nightmare,” said Fen Hampson, a foreign policy and conflict resolution expert at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“It’s coming from him, and he’s acting against his own interest,” Janice Stein, a global public policy specialist at the University of Toronto, said of Trump’s talk.

There’s no perfect way to convert Canada’s multiparty parliamentary system into America’s congressional system with caucuses for just two parties.

But Hampson and Nik Nanos, one of Canada’s top pollsters and researchers, agreed to examine their nation’s political trends and extrapolate what it would mean for American politics if this turned into reality. While Stein is not a data specialist, she agreed with their overall thesis.

Their consensus: If Canadians had been a part of the 2024 elections, Democrats would have claimed a healthy House majority. The GOP’s Senate margin probably would have been cut in half, and Trump’s sweeping electoral college victory would have come down to a super-narrow 120,000-vote edge in Pennsylvania.

In summary, these independent analysts had a simple message for Trump: “Be careful what you wish for,” Hampson said.

Canada’s western provinces have some MAGA-like conservatives, but they are a small portion of the national electorate. The eastern conservatives are more closely aligned with today’s era of Midwestern and Northeastern Republicans such as Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and former Maryland governor Larry Hogan. In current U.S. politics, these voters might fit best into the Republican “Never Trump” movement.

“Our Conservative Party is not as far to the right as a MAGA conservative party,” Stein said.

On Wednesday, for the first time in weeks, Trump brought up the 51st-state issue and mocked “Governor Trudeau,” while complaining about the trade deficit and reasserting his demand for Canada to join the union. “I have to be honest, as a state it works great,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

At the White House last month, Trump dismissed questions about the potential political impact and complained that the border was created with an “artificial line.”

On Monday, about 18 million Canadian voters will cast ballots for their member of Parliament, with the majority party able to form the government. The Liberal Party of Canada, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, has a perceived edge over the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Pierre Poilievre.

Just three months ago, before Carney took over for the very unpopular Justin Trudeau, Poilievre’s Conservatives appeared poised for victory. Then Trump ramped up talk of a takeover and started a trade war.

The Liberals currently hold 152 of 331 seats in Parliament, a little more than 45%, but liberal-leaning third parties account for almost another 20% of seats. Conservatives hold just 120 seats.

Hampson’s analysis on the impact to the U.S. House, if Canada were to actually join now as the 51st state, assumed the current makeup of each congressional district covering about 765,000 constituents.

With a population similar to California’s, Canada would receive a similar allotment in the House: Of those 53 seats, 34 would end up represented by members who would caucus with Democrats.

And just 19 would end up with Republicans, according to Hampson.

That 15-vote gain would turn the House over to Democrats, who ended the 2024 election with 215 seats to the 220 in GOP hands. That 249-239 Democratic majority would be bigger than any of the last three Congresses.

Nanos came away with only slightly different numbers, suggesting that a couple of liberal-leaning western Canadian cities would squeeze out two more seats for the U.S. Democratic caucus, for a 36-17 edge across the Great North.

Any way you slice the data, in this - again, hypothetical - scenario, the House speaker would be Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and the Trump White House would be battling subpoenas from the Democratic chairs of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees: Reps. Gerry Connolly (Virginia) and Jamie Raskin (Maryland), respectively.

Some members of the Bloc Québécois, the party promoting Quebec sovereignty, would probably still win seats for this newly configured House of Representatives. But Hampson and Nanos said those members would almost certainly caucus with Democrats because of their socially liberal agenda. Plus, the French-speaking lawmakers would be repulsed by a GOP caucus pushing English as a national language, according to Hampson and Nanos.

Canadian politics has seen a shift over the past couple of decades similar to U.S. politics, in which the major fault lines tend to be along the rural-urban and college/non-college divide.

So Republican gains would come in rural, working-class areas in the west where Trudeau was deeply unpopular. “If you ask an average Albertan, they’ve got more in common with their Montana neighbors,” Nanos said.

In this experiment, Hampson and Nanos thought it foolish to make Canada a single state because of its massive size and ideological diversity, but they agreed that as one state, Democrats would be favored to win both Senate seats and all 55 of its electoral college votes.

Since 1963, conservatives have been in charge about 20 years, while liberals have held power more than twice as often.

If Canada sent two Democratic senators to Washington, Republicans would still be in charge, a 53-51 majority. But that would greatly empower a pair of moderates who have not been shy about opposing Trump, Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).

For instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confirmation would have been rejected, in a 54-50 vote, as those two were joined by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in opposing the controversial nominee. In a 53-51 Senate, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have needed Vice President JD Vance to break a 52-52 tie (Collins and McConnell voted no), and he could have been defeated if Murkowski or any other Republican decided to oppose him.

It is this dynamic that leaves many Republicans confused by Trump’s overtures toward Canada.

In an interview, Murkowski poked fun at how conservative Republicans would not allow the District of Columbia, and its overwhelming Democratic voter lean, to get an actual vote in Congress beyond delegate status.

“You got to think about the political implications of it,” Murkowski said in a recent interview, dismissing the issue as a nonstarter, “if you were taking it seriously.”

Some rank-and-file Republicans who support Trump are confused by any talk of potentially helping Democrats by adding Canada as a state.

“I don’t think anybody thinks that’s a great idea,” Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., told NBC News last month. “Oh, by the way, how many electoral college votes are they going to get?”

For as much as most folks in politics dismiss talk of a 51st state, Canadians take nothing for granted. Hampson noted how voters there tracked things such as King Charles III wearing his Canadian medals as a possible sign of anti-Trump behavior.

In an interview before Trump’s Wednesday anti-Trudeau rant, Stein said Canadians had monitored how Trump wasn’t saying “governor” since his first call with Carney.

Nanos said all of this talk was both silly and important - his polling data shows no support for joining America, but there’s legitimate turbulence within western provinces that could some day lead to a split.

For now, however, most Canadians just want to see the results of their real-life election, not Trump’s make-believe takeover of their nation.