Canadian Accountant recently published some material on the voting preferences of accountants.

That was on July 21, which probably still counts as recent, but the article already feels like something of a historical artifact, given Biden’s subsequent withdrawal from the race and the astounding revitalization of the Democratic campaign. Anyway, here’s what it had to say:

• In 2020, according to the American platform Accounting Today, 55% of accountants intended to vote for Donald Trump, compared to 38% who would vote for Joe Biden. “That a majority of accountants should plan to vote for President Trump is no surprise — they favored him by even larger margins in 2016, and the profession has leaned heavily Republican in previous presidential elections.” 
• In April of this year, Accounting Today released the results of new polling, showing a virtually even split in party preferences, albeit with a large number of undecided voters. (Unlike in 2020, Accounting Today did not frame the question in terms of presidential nominees but rather in terms of party preferences.) American accountants also shared a general distrust of election integrity and a clear belief that Republican victories would be best for their firms and the accounting profession as a whole. 
• “Things are pretty much neck and neck when it comes to accountants with declared preferences in the presidential race — but almost a third of those polled are still up in the air, split evenly between those who prefer not to answer and those who are undecided.” Despite a clear preference for Donald Trump in 2020, however, more survey respondents in 2024 claimed they voted for Joe Biden in the last presidential election. (Accounting Today did not explain the anomaly.) 
• “Regardless of their individual choice for this year’s specific presidential candidates, the profession shows a marked preference for Republican leadership in the Oval Office and Congress.” This preference mirrors a similar pattern in Canada. In our own election polling, Canadian accountants tend to vote Conservative, even when it places the profession at odds with the public. 

The best I can say about the 55% number is that it could have been worse (and probably was, given the apparent suggestion that some respondents might have their reasons for lying on this point). Of course accountants come in many varieties, and maybe for some of those, for the narrow computationally-oriented “bean counter” of popular myth (a term I’ve never used before in this blog, except once when I was disapprovingly quoting someone), it doesn’t matter what their broader view of things is. But I might argue, if only as a thought experiment, that someone who continues to broadly support Trump for President should be precluded from credibly serving as an auditor, or in any role of strategic forward-looking importance. Trump’s compulsive incoherence and cruelty, his pathological resistance of social norms, his relentless corruption and disregard for the law, his rejection of rationality itself, are all in my view in direct conflict with a profession that inherently depends on literacy, analytical prowess, and on the premise that representing and studying the past and the present provide some informed basis for making decisions about the future. And as I’ve argued before, if Trump’s sexism and racism and pro-authoritarianism aren’t explicitly in conflict with accounting concepts and principles, they’re surely in conflict with what we might hope to identify as the forward-looking “spirit” of accounting. That’s just if your focus is on financial reporting: for those engaged in sustainability reporting, the pro-Trump case is even weaker, evoking a fire-fighter who might vote for a compulsive arsonist.

True enough, I wouldn’t vote Conservative or Republican no matter who the nominee was, but I believe a support for Trump lies outside the scope of “political preference” and requires jettisoning the normal deference to differing views and inclinations (the IFRS Foundation, sad to say, has not yet acted on my previous recommendation regarding the message it should be sending him). The aforementioned notion that Trump would be better for the accounting profession, and for business as a whole, merely makes idiots out of those who subscribe to it: placing the sugar high of tax cuts and deregulation above any long-term notion of sustainability and stability (and thus intersecting with the dismal short-termism we looked at here).

Another Canadian Accountant article prior to the last Canadian election indicated that six out of ten Canadian accountants intended to vote Conservative, twenty per cent Liberal, seven per cent Green and three per cent NDP (i.e. the more left-leaning New Democratic Party). I’ve previously revealed that I voted NDP myself in that election; given the poll’s ±10.0 margin of error, maybe I’m the only Canadian accountant who did, or at least the only one who’d admit to it. In that light, you may certainly take the views I expressed above as being too esoteric to be taken seriously. But at least they’re a contribution to diversity of thinking!

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.