Imagining a French electoral college

By THE DATA TEAM

FRANCE’S presidential election bears some superficial similarities to America’s presidential campaign last year. Both contests pitted populists—Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States—against liberals with ties to high finance, who had held senior cabinet roles in the incumbent administrations (Emmanuel Macron in France and Hillary Clinton in America). In both elections, the establishment candidates won the popular vote by a narrow but decisive margin—three percentage points in Mr Macron’s case, two in Ms Clinton’s. However, a difference between the two countries’ political systems caused the outcomes of the elections to diverge. America’s electoral college handed the presidency to the nationalist candidate, whereas France’s two-round method with the winner chosen by popular vote is expected to deliver victory to the globalist one by a comfortable margin.

Might Ms Le Pen be celebrating already today if France had copied the American electoral college? Her voters did tend to be rural and geographically dispersed, just like Mr Trump’s. In contrast, Mr Macron’s supporters concentrated in cities as Ms Clinton’s did.