The Scottish Election Study’s own expert on US politics, Prof. Christopher Carman (christopher.carman@glasgow.ac.uk), takes a closer look at Donald Trump’s support in Scotland using SES data.
With the announcement that U.S. President Donald Trump will be visiting his Scottish golf courses between the 25th and 29th of July 2025, the obvious question that springs to mind is, “How warm of a welcome can the famously polarising U.S. President expect in the country of his mother’s birth?”
Looking at the Scottish Election Study’s February 2025 Scottish Opinion (Scoop) monitoring survey, it is probably safe to say that Donald John Trump will find that Scotland’s notoriously chilly climate is not just limited to the weather in his case.
And that should not be terribly surprising given that his previous visits to Scotland provoked protests large and small across the country. Memorably, the late comedian Jane Godley was photographed holding a sign at Trump’s Turnberry golf resort using language not suitable for pre-watershed television broadcast.
But where does Trump stand with the Scottish public early in his second term and with his visit looming? In February 2025, we asked Scottish Election Study respondents to rate various political leaders. Specifically, we asked, “Now using a… scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means ‘strongly dislike’ and 10 means ‘strongly like’, please tell us how you feel about the following political leaders. If you don’t recognise a name, then please just say ‘don’t know’.” In our list of political leaders we included: John Swinney, Anas Sarwar, Russel Findlay, Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that President Trump was the least popular political figure in Scotland, and by some way. Of course, no political leader came away smelling like roses, but on the 0 – 10 scale, Trump scored an average rating of 1.76. In comparison, Nigel Farage had an average “like” score of 2.19, Anas Sarwar had 3.47 and John Swinney topped the like-scale with 4.0 – winning the dubious prize of least unpopular.
And note that our survey was taken less than a month into what has been an incredible, unprecedented presidential term, with Trump overturning long-held rules and norms of political diplomacy and decorum. Since our survey he has up-ended the global economy through his tariffs, had an Oval Office showdown with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, massively increased U.S. support for Israel’s military offensive in Palestine and directed the U.S. Air Force to bomb Iran. So there is some reason to think President Trump could be even less popular now than he was in February 2025, as he seems to be with the American public.
Trump Supporters… and Detractors
Looking beyond the basic averages, though, what can we say about who is likely to be shaking their fists at the Trump motorcade, and who is more likely to be returning the President’s characteristic thumbs up?
To get a sense for the patterns in support for President Trump (or the lack thereof) in Scottish society, we developed a basic statistical (ordinary least squares regression) model predicting Trump support. In this model we included individual respondents’ core demographic characteristics, their political party support scores and some measures of basic political attitudes, such as political left/right ideology and support for populist messages.
The key takeaways from this analysis are:
Young People are Warmer on Trump (All Else Being Equal): Amongst the demographic variables we included in the statistical model – that is, age, gender, university education (or not) and social class – only age is a statistically significant predictor of “liking” (or not) Donald Trump, and it makes quite a difference. This trend only emerges in the statistical model when accounting for other factors, as there is little apparent difference across age groups when we look at the raw numbers. But as shown in this graph, once we control for general political right/left ideology and other demographics, young people seem, on average, to feel quite a bit warmer toward President Trump (for 16-year olds, 2.40 on the 0-10 scale) than do people in the older generations (for 75-year olds, 1.35 on the 0-10 scale). To be sure, these scores do not exactly mean that younger people will likely be love-bombing the U.S. President when he visits Scotland, but the generational differences are nonetheless striking and somewhat mirror the dynamic that emerged in the U.S. election.
And whilst a person’s sex is not an independently significant predictor at the conventional .05 level of statistical significance (so that we can’t rule out the possibility that differences between men and women occurred simply by chance), the gendered differences are close enough to being considered significant predictors that they warrant considering. Interestingly, we see a substantially wider gap between men and women amongst our younger respondents than we do amongst older survey participants. Young people are more supportive of President Trump than are older people, and young men are more supportive than are young women. True – older men are a touch more supportive of Trump than are older women, but, frankly, there is not much in it. The action here is amongst younger, less politically minded Scots.
Liking Reform = Liking Trump: No great surprise here – those Scots who say that they would be inclined to vote for the Reform Party also tend to express greater affect for Trump. Taking into account all of the other variables in our statistical model, those Scoop respondents who said that they would not consider voting for Reform on average rated Trump at about 1.38 on our 0-10 scale. Those who said they were “very likely” to vote for Reform rated Trump at 3.06, or there is a 1.68-point difference in pro- and anti-Reform voters in how they view the current U.S. President.
Whilst this is certainly a big difference and no surprise that Reform supporters tend to rate Trump more highly than do Reform detractors, if you flip this around, there is perhaps an eyebrow-raising element: you might find it surprising that Reform supporters are not more exuberant in their support for President Trump. As a point of comparison, people who really like Reform leader Nigel Farage (giving him the highest rating on the leader measure) on average rated Trump at 5.72, whilst those who really dislike Farage rated Trump at 0.62. Though that is the largest difference revealed in our model, the fact that (again, taking all the other variables in our model into account) the very keen Reform party and Nigel Farage supporters are not more “in like” with Trump signals the relatively low support for the president across Scotland.
One additional note on the patterns of party support – only one other of our party support measures is a significant predictor of support for Donald Trump. People who say that they are “very likely” to vote Liberal Democrat rate Trump lower than do people who say they are “very unlikely” to vote for the Liberals. The difference, at about ¾ of a point, is not as large as it is for Reform, but it is statistically significant.
None of the support measures for any of the other parties – SNP, Labour, Conservatives and Greens – are significant predictors of Trump support. Support for these parties per se is unrelated to support for Trump.
People Who Do Not Like Experts, Like Trump: Lastly, we can consider the different measures of political attitudes and positions that we included in the statistical model. Again, it is no great surprise that people on the political left rate Trump lower than do people on the political right. But, again, whilst the pattern is not surprising, it might be a surprise to know that the difference is only about a point different between the ideological extremes. People on the far left (holding all the other variables in the model constant) on average rate Trump at about 1.26, whilst people who place themselves at the far ideological right rate Trump at 2.38. Again, these would be the people you would think would quite like Donald John Trump. Even amongst people on the far right in Scotland, Trump is not exactly held in great repute.
In our February Scoop we also asked our respondents two different series of questions: one series measures how much someone expresses support (or opposition) for populist political messages; the other series measures how much someone trusts (or distrusts) experts, intellectuals and scientific facts. Somewhat surprisingly, the populism scale that we created is not related to support for Trump. On the other hand, there is clear evidence that those who express scepticism toward experts and scientific facts have a rather more positive view of President Trump. There is almost a 1.2-point difference in ratings of Trump between those people who think that experts and scientific facts should inform public policy and those who do not trust experts and science.
In conclusion…
Pulling all this together, what does this tell us about Trump support in Scotland as the country begins to make plans for him to visit Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire?
Young people, people on the political right and those who are positively disposed toward Reform and its leader, Nigel Farage tend to express greater support for President Trump. And there are hints that men tend to be more supportive of Trump than are women.
On the other hand, Scotland is clearly not a country that is overly fond of the current U.S. Commander-in-Chief. Looking at the raw averages, Trump is rated quite poorly by Scots. And digging into our data, even those who really like Reform Party leader Nigel Farage are at best lukewarm on the U.S. President.
Even when visiting in the height of the Scottish summer, it does not seem that Trump is likely to receive a terribly warm welcome.