… Conventional wisdom about the 2016 primary has analysts stipulating that dividing the anti-Trump vote will allow him to win the primary again with plurality support, as he did last time around. After all, he only won 45% of the popular vote in the primary; surely if Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich had united against him they could have won, right?
Wrong, actually. This cursory analysis of the 2016 primary makes a key mistake. Looking solely at actual primary vote totals obscures how primary voters would have cast their ballots in a two-horse race. For that, you need a survey.
Jonathan Woon, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-authors have an answer for us. In their paper “Trump is not a (Condorcet) loser! Social choice analysis of the 2016 Republican presidential nomination” the authors look at two academic surveys conducted in January 2016. Their goal is to establish whether supporters of Trump’s opponents were in fact opposed to Trump, or if enough would have coalesced around him to push him over the majority threshold in all hypothetical races with only two candidates. CONTINUED
G. Elliott Morris, Politics by the Numbers
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