Some European commentators, including in this newspaper, are prophesying, nine or ten months in advance, that Trump will once again be president of the United States and are already announcing the serious international imbalances that this will entail. By analogy, they remind me of the atmosphere in Washington during the euro crisis, ten or twelve years ago. I was once invited, along with three other European colleagues, to a meeting of the National Intelligence Council with a dozen members of the State Department, NSA, CIA and FBI and a second circle of various aides and spies taking notes. The impression was that Americans not only expected, but wished, that the euro would disappear and the European Union would fail.
Now I have the symmetrical impression: how many Europeans strive to see everything bad about the United States, blind to all the great successes of their people, and predict, not without glee, 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 election was between Haley and Trump. There is little doubt that the winner would also be Haley. In other words, there is a possible candidate who would win by an absolute majority against each of the other candidates.
A voting procedure that has a lot of prestige in academia consists of precisely this: pairwise comparisons of candidates. It was outlined by jurists of the Roman Empire, elaborated by Ramon Llull (including 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 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 can win who would lose by majority to another who has been eliminated in the process.
Let's go to the present. Barack Obama visited Joe Biden during the Christmas holidays and urged him to reorganize his election 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 about them if Trump won and, as he himself has announced, became dictator on the first day of his mandate. . Biden has begun 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 sidelined, in which case delegates to the Democratic Party Convention in August could select another candidate. If the accident occurred after the convention, the party's national committee also has the power to appoint another. California Governor Gavin Newsom has already jumped in line. Even if the candidate is Biden, one of the best decisions Democrats could make would be to replace the inept and unpopular vice president on the ticket. 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 run, he would think about it. But there is no doubt that Trump will try to run despite everything, if only to try to reach the White House and from there forgive himself for his crimes.
A large majority of citizens declare in polls that they would not like an election between these two very elderly candidates. 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 in which the winner benefited from a third 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 state-based College, 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 some of the pending trials for almost a hundred accusations, as will most likely happen. On the other hand, economic growth and employment have improved in recent years and, although inflation most affects the two most valued goods for the average American, the house and gasoline, the perception of the economy as a whole is declining. less pessimistic.
The most favorable expectation for Biden is that, after an intense anti-Trump campaign, at the last moment many voters will turn their cape into a tunic 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. The sad thing about the situation is that Trump may also be the only candidate that Biden could beat: it would be a match between two losers through the Llull-Condorcet procedure.
