Some European commentators, even in this newspaper, are prophesying, nine or ten months in advance, that Trump will be president of the United States again and are already announcing the serious international imbalances that this will bring. By analogy, they remind me of the atmosphere in Washington during the euro crisis, ten or twelve years ago. Once I was invited, along with three other European colleagues, to a meeting of the National Intelligence Council with a dozen members of the State Department, the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI and a second circle of assistants and various spies taking notes. The impression was that Americans not only expected, but wished for the euro to disappear and the European Union to fail.
Now I have the symmetrical impression: how many Europeans try to see everything that is bad about the United States, blind to all the great achievements of its people, and predict not without joy that Trump will win. A mean way to settle for how one is doing is to say that the other is doing worse. But this desire is suicidal for Europeans and most of the world.
Allow me a little political science. Let’s imagine there were only two candidates: Nikki Haley and Joe Biden. Who would win? I’ve asked colleagues, experts and friends, and we all agree on Haley. Suppose, alternatively, that the choice was between Haley and Trump. There is little doubt that the winner would be Haley as well. In other words, there is a possible candidate who would win by an absolute majority against each of the other two candidates.
A voting procedure that has a lot of prestige in the academy consists precisely of this: pairwise comparisons of candidates. It was outlined by jurists of the Roman Empire, elaborated by Ramon Llull (even in the novel Blanquerna), reinvented during the French Revolution by Condorcet, and later by an American mathematician, Copeland.
None of them knew about the precedents, but the procedure was reinvented several times because it is very intuitive: the candidate who wins the most times by majority should be proclaimed the winner by majority. The problem with primary elections and the Presidential Electoral College in the United States is that this condition is not met: a candidate who would lose by a majority to another who has been eliminated in the process can win.
Let’s go to the present. Barack Obama visited Joe Biden over the Christmas holidays and urged him to reorganize his campaign team and focus on the issue: this election is about democracy or dictatorship, pro-Trump or anti-Trump. The economy, immigration, abortion, climate change, Ukraine or Israel are important issues, but nothing good could be done if Trump won and, as he himself has announced, became a dictator on the first day of his term. Biden has started to move in that direction.
However, it is not confirmed that Biden and Trump will be the candidates. Biden could have a health accident and be out of the running, in which case delegates to the Democratic Party Convention in August could select another candidate. If the accident were after the convention, the party’s national committee also has powers to appoint another. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has already joined the queue. Even if the candidate is Biden, one of the best decisions the Democrats could make would be to replace the inept and unpopular vice president in the nomination. Just in case.
On the other hand, Trump could be excluded as a candidate for having participated in an insurrection. Biden missed saying that if Trump didn’t show up, he would think about it. But there is no doubt that Trump will try to run regardless, if only to try to get to the White House and from there pardon himself for his crimes.
A large majority of citizens declare in the polls that they would not like a choice between these two candidates of very advanced age. This disenchantment could produce more abstention than in recent elections, especially among young people and African-Americans, and perhaps generate votes for other parties. We have already seen elections where the winner benefited from a third party candidate, such as Bill Clinton, as well as the victory of a candidate with fewer popular votes than the other as a result of indirect election through the Col · law based on states, such as George W. Bush and Trump himself.
A campaign focused on the dangers of Trump can certainly benefit Biden. A large sector of Republican voters states that they would not vote for Trump if he were convicted in any of the pending trials for almost a hundred accusations, as will most likely be the case. On the other hand, economic growth and employment have improved in recent years, and although inflation affects the two goods most valued by the average American, the house and gasoline, the perception of the economy in overall is less and less pessimistic.
The most favorable expectation for Biden is that, after an intense anti-Trump campaign, at the last moment many voters will put on their hats and go to the polls. Something like this already happened in the Democratic primaries four years ago, when Biden was behind several candidates, but he created the image that he was the best to beat Trump. In fact, Trump is the Democrats’ favorite Republican candidate to defeat him. What is sad about the situation is that Trump is perhaps also the only candidate whom Biden could beat: it would be a contest between two losers due to the Llull-Condorcet procedure.