Don’t Treat Trump as a Condorcet Winner
Post-inauguration, there continue to be misunderstandings of the election.
Some of the commentary about the beginning of Trump’s second term seems wildly overstated. One example is the column by POLITICO’s global editor-in-chief, John Harris, where he argues that Trump is “the greatest American figure of his era” because he is so dominant. “He is a force of history,” according to Harris, and “also a potent expression of democracy.” That’s a misreading of what happened in the election, but in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if the misreading becomes accepted as truth.
There’s no denying that Trump and his MAGA movement is a very potent force in contemporary America. His popularity is widespread (and obviously deep among many of his supporters). As the election results show, Trump and his MAGA movement was more popular than Kamala Harris and the Democratic party for which she belatedly became its standard-bearer. But Trump doesn’t have the support of a majority of Americans. The ABC News 538’s polling average currently has Trump’s favorability at 46.4%, and his unfavorability at 48.0%.
Many in the media, however, including Harris, are treating Trump as if he’s the equivalent of a “Condorcet Winner,” who would beat each and every political opponent that was put up against him head-to-head. We have no evidence of that. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary, as I’ve previously explained.
But you don’t need to go so far as to agree with my argument that Nikki Haley would have been the Condorcet Winner in last November’s election—if the system were set up to let her demonstrate that—to recognize the undeniable fact that Trump’s victory over Harris cannot prove that he would have been the Condorcet Winner in the election. All we know, given the way we run our elections, is that he was more popular among the nation’s voters than Harris. We were never given the head-to-head matchup between Trump and Haley as part of the general election to determine whether the nation’s electorate as a whole, as opposed to just the GOP primary electorate, would have preferred him to her, or vice versa. Without knowing the outcome of that electoral contest, none of us—Trump and his MAGA supporters included—should not overinterpret the outcome of the 2024 election.
This point relates to a larger one about the nature of our Madisonian system. As Bruce Ackerman (one of my law school professors) explained, a fundamental premise of the Madisonian system is that no single institution of government is capable of representing the American people perfectly. Every election is a necessarily imperfect approximation of the public will—and certainly of the public interest—even if some electoral systems produce better approximations than others, just as some paintings or photographs capture the likeness of an individual better than others. The Madisonian system divides government power into separate representative institutions, so that no single one can claim to be the unique embodiment of the public will (or public interest). All of the representative bodies need to be on board to act on behalf of the people.
We are in grave danger of losing the essence of our Madisonian system if we interpret Trump’s victory in November as meaning that he now embodies the will of the nation—even a historical juggernaut, as John Harris conveys it. We shouldn’t make this mistake even if we had an electoral system that enabled us to identify a Condorcet Winner among all the presidential candidates. But we certainly shouldn’t make this mistake when our electoral system lacks this capacity and thus prevents us from determining which candidate Madison would consider “the real preference of the Voters” if able to beat each opponent head-to-head.