Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:34:39.645Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Trump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2020

Jonathan Woon Open the ORCID record for Jonathan Woon [Opens in a new window] ,
Sean Craig ,
Amanda Leifson  and
Matthew Tarpey
Jonathan Woon
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Sean Craig
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Amanda Leifson
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Matthew Tarpey
Affiliation:
College of William & Mary
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to assess the plausibility of this claim. Relying on novel data to construct individuals’ complete preferences over the set of leading Republican candidates, we find that no other candidate strictly defeats Trump in pairwise majority-rule comparisons and—far from being a Condorcet loser—that Trump is a member of the majority-rule core. Our results question the plausibility of the coordination narrative because Trump’s support was wider than political observers believed: it came from a broad base of the Republican primary electorate rather than a small but intense minority.

Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 407 - 412
Copyright
© American Political Science Association, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abramson, Paul R., Aldrich, John H., Paolino, Phil, and Rohde, David W.. 1992. “‘Sophisticated’ Voting in the 1988 Presidential Primaries.” American Political Science Review 86 (1): 55–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austen-Smith, David, and Banks, Jeffrey S.. 1999. Positive Political Theory I: Collective Choice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Azari, Julia. 2016. “A for Effort? Republican Elites Tried to Coordinate but Never Quite Got There.” Vox, May 19. Available at www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2016/5/19/1171261/republican-elites-coordination.Google Scholar
Azari, Julia, and Masket, Seth. 2017. “Intraparty Democracy and the 2016 Election.” In Conventional Wisdom, Parties, and Broken Barriers in the 2016 Election. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J., Huber, Gregory A., and Lenz, Gabriel S.. 2012. “Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.” Political Analysis 20 (3): 351–68.10.1093/pan/mpr057CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brady, Henry E., and Ansolabehere, Stephen. 1989. “The Nature of Utility Functions in Mass Publics.” American Political Science Review 83 (1): 143–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burns, Alexander, and Martin, Jonathan. 2016. “Republican Leaders Map a Strategy to Derail Donald Trump.” New York Times, March 19. Available at www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-party.html.Google Scholar
Feld, Scott L., and Bernard, Grofman. 1988.“Ideological Consistency as a Collective Phenomenon.” American Political Science Review 82 (3): 773–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forsythe, Robert, Myerson, Roger B., Rietz, Thomas A., and Weber, Robert J.. 1993. “An Experiment on Coordination in Multi-Candidate Elections: The Importance of Polls and Election Histories.” Social Choice and Welfare 10 (3): 223–47.10.1007/BF00182507Google Scholar
Jones, Bradford, Radcliff, Benjamin, Taber, Charles, and Timpone, Richard. 1995. “Condorcet Winners and the Paradox of Voting: Probability Calculations for Weak Preference Orders.” American Political Science Review 89 (1): 137–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter. 2018. “Trump, Condorcet, and Borda: Voting Paradoxes in the 2016 Republican Presidential Primaries.” European Journal of Political Economy 55 (December): 29–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maskin, Eric, and Sen, Amartya. 2016. “How Majority Rule Might Have Stopped Donald Trump.” New York Times, May 1. Available at www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/opinion/sunday/how-majority-rule-might-have-stopped-donald-trump.html.Google Scholar
Niemi, Richard G., and Wright, John R.. 1987. “Voting Cycles and the Structure of Individual Preferences.” Social Choice and Welfare 4 (3): 173–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nurmi, Hannu. 1983. “Voting Procedures: A Summary Analysis.” British Journal of Political Science 13 (2): 181–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potthoff, Richard F., and Munger, Michael C.. 2005. “Voter Uncertainty Can Produce Preferences with More Than One Peak, but Not Preference Cycles: A Clue to the Fate of Ross Perot?” Journal of Politics 67 (2): 429–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radcliff, Benjamin. 1993. “The Structure of Voter Preferences.” Journal of Politics 55 (3): 714–19.Google Scholar
Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism Against Populism. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Stokols, Eli. 2016. “GOP Elites Line up Behind Ted Cruz.” Politico, March 23. Available at www.politico.com/story/2016/03/ted-cruz-republican-establishment-elites-221174.Google Scholar
Voorhees, Josh. 2015. “Scott Walker Drops Out—Urges Other Republicans to Do the Same.” Slate, September 21. Available at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/09/scott-walker-drops-out-of-2016-race-urges-other-republicans-to-do-the-same.html.Google Scholar
Wright, Stephen G., and Riker, William H.. 1989. “Plurality and Runoff Systems and Numbers of Candidates.” Public Choice 60:155–75.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Woon et al. supplementary material

Appendix

Download Woon et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 140.1 KB