At a conference here earlier this month organized by the University of Southern Denmark, I asked the crowd of mostly students whom they wanted to win the U.S. election. It wasn’t a scientific poll, but it brought home how anxious Europeans are about the choice Americans will make in November.

I anticipated the outcome but not its scope. Of the roughly 40 people in the room, all but five picked Vice President Kamala Harris. Each of those five took what I called the Tim Walz option: declaring that the election was none of their damn business. Not one hand was raised for former President Donald Trump.

Perhaps a Danish Trump supporter or two, wary of bucking the overwhelming sentiment in the room, were hidden among the abstainers. And maybe the younger academic crowd was not exactly representative.

But as it turns out, my informal Harris landslide reflected European sentiment quite accurately. A July poll by Megafon, a Danish market research institute, found that 85 percent of Danes wanted Harris to win; 8 percent picked Trump. In Germany, a DeutschlandTrend survey in August gave Harris a 77 percent to 10 percent advantage. The gap is narrower in Britain, partly because Trump polls well among supporters of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Reform Party. Still, in a July Ipsos survey, Harris was the preferred victor, 50 percent to 21 percent.

Few, if any, American voters will decide whom to vote for based on what Europeans say. Nonetheless, the United States’ friends abroad give us a lot to think about.

We should consider what we will be telling the world if we elect a man who is dismissive of truth, decency and democracy itself. There are also lessons in how Europeans are grappling with the rise of their own far right and their political struggles over immigration, which bear strong similarities to our own.

What has struck me most during several visits to Europe this year is the anguish that a potential second Trump presidency is causing among our staunchest friends.

“Most Danes are aghast that Trump could be president,” said Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark who has been teaching American history for 37 years. “For most of that time, a lot of the emphasis was on the genius of the American system and the old view that it was a ‘machine that runs by itself.’ Now, the focus is much more on the flaws of the system and its anti-majoritarian nature.”

Proportional multiparty systems have mostly allowed parties running from the center-right through the left to isolate the extreme right. But in the U.S., Trumpism has taken over one of the major parties, largely swallowing up the American center-right.

Yet European and American political leaders across the philosophical spectrum have something in common: On the center-right and center-left alike, they have responded to the far right’s successes by toughening their positions on immigration.

Politically, it can work. In Denmark’s case, social democrats govern the country, having won back voters who had strayed rightward by adopting harsh refugee policies. President Joe Biden and Harris hope their tough border stance will at least partially neutralize Trump, who has made it his campaign’s central issue. But hard-line immigration stances from the political center can legitimize the far-right parties, too. It’s a dilemma that advocates of pluralistic democracy have yet to resolve.

Whatever they disagree on, Europeans are broadly united in their alarm over what a second Trump term would mean for the alliance of democracies and the American story they admire.

Bjerre-Poulsen told me that if you listen closely to the European reaction to Trump, “there is no anti-Americanism but, rather, a sense of sorrow.”

We’re in danger of breaking the hearts of the people around the world who appreciate us most.

E.J. Dionne Jr.’s is a Washington Post columnist.