It is looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will win America’s presidential election. There are two uniquely American reasons for this: the electoral system and the nation’s political demography.
Kamala Harris would likely win if she were running in almost every other country that elects presidents by popular vote. She remains ahead in most polling averages, although her lead is shrinking. Although some highly-respected national polls show Trump tied or ahead, it would still shock most observers if Trump did win the popular vote.
Trump is the favourite because the United States elects its president via the Electoral College, not the popular vote. That system, enshrined in the nation’s 1787 constitution, allocates each state and the District of Columbia a number of electoral votes equal to the number of Senators (two each) and Representatives it sends to Congress. Presidents are elected when a majority of that body vote for a candidate regardless of the popular vote.
This approach is amplified by the way each state has chosen to award its votes. With two small exceptions (Maine and Nebraska), states award all of their electoral votes to the person who finishes first in that state’s popular vote. Candidates need only a plurality, not a majority, of the votes to get 100 percent of the electoral votes.
Trump’s political coalition of working-class voters and traditional Republicans is uniquely powerful in this system. Working-class whites are a much larger share of the electorates in three large states in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
It doesn’t matter that he loses the largest state, California, by millions of votes. It would be as if the huge margins Emmanuel Macron received in the Ile de France region in the 2022 election didn’t count once he had received one more vote than Marine Le Pen. American majorities must be regionally distributed, not concentrated in a few places, to prevail.
A look at the recent Austrian national election demonstrates this clearly. Assume Austria had an electoral college system on the American model whereby each federal state had electoral votes equal to the number of National Council (Nationalrat) members it selects, plus two for each state. The FPÖ would have received a plurality, just as it did in the real election.
But the largest state, Lower Austria, was carried by the ÖVP by only a few thousand votes. If just 4,500 people there had switched from the ÖVP to the FPÖ, the FPÖ would have won the state. Under the American system, that would have given the party all of the state’s electoral votes, providing it with a majority.
This fact more than anything else explains why America has only two major parties. The presidential power is simply too great to risk losing it by partisan division.
This, however, only points to the importance of the second factor behind Trump’s success. In nations like France, voters coalesced across party lines in 2017 and 2022 to deny the conservative populist Marine Le Pen the win. Why don’t Americans vote the same way?
The answer is its political demography. Unlike in Europe, cultural and religious conservatives still wield significant voting power. They do not want to go blindly into political oblivion, as so many of their European and Anglosphere cousins have. They will vote for Trump come hell or high water to stop the more secular party’s nominee from wielding immense power.
They are joined by the same type of voter that backs conservative populists in Europe, the less-educated manual labourer. These people have been economically pressed by globalisation and are the ones most likely to be competing with immigrants for jobs and housing. They want a person or party that will promise to protect them against undesirable change.
Finally, these voters are joined by a group which in Europe still shies away from supporting populists, economically centre-right and relatively affluent voters. These people are akin to the French who live in Paris’ affluent arrondissements and expensive suburbs in the Hautes de Seine. In America, many of these people back Trump while in France almost all back Macron.
There are two reasons why this is. First, America retains a strong suspicion of state intervention in the economy. Many of these voters don’t want government to expand or levy higher taxes. Since Democrats still pledge to raise taxes on corporations and higher-income households, these people reluctantly back Trump to stop what they view as the greater evil.
Americans also have no history with authoritarianism. Europeans still keenly feel the devastation and tyranny that Nazism and fascism wrought. Harris now directly says what others have long argued, that Trump is in fact a fascist. This claim falls on deaf ears, however, given the American experience of over two centuries of uninterrupted republican and democratic governance.
The election is still too close to call definitively, and Harris could reverse the decline of the past two weeks. If the current trends hold, however, Trump’s diverse coalition will prevail. If that happens, his stated desire to dramatically change America’s policies at home and in the world will be put to the test.
Populist parties can gain power only by deals with conservatives