What if America voted like France?

Now imagine if we had a runoff in place, to assure that our Presidents had popular majority backing. Who would have their portraits on the wall?

It’s highly likely that Al Gore would have won such a contest in 2000; the center/left candidates (Gore and Ralph Nader) outpolled the center/right candidates (Bush and Pat Buchanan) by some 3 million votes. It’s likely that Hillary Clinton, flawed as she was as a candidate, would have bested Trump in a runoff with voters who had chosen Gary Johnson and Jill Stein or who had stayed home the first time, but now realized that Trump might actually win.

Other alternate outcomes are foggier. Given the historic closeness of the 1960 popular vote—JFK had an official plurality of 0.1%—a Nixon victory in a runoff would have been at least plausible. There’s a persistent myth about the 1992 campaign that Ross Perot’s 19% of the popular vote cost George H.W. Bush the win, although exit polls then showed that Perot voters would have split evenly between Bush and Clinton. So a Clinton victory in a runoff would have been the likely outcome. Even discounting for speculation, it’s still striking that a different system would have given us Nixon instead of Kennedy, Gore instead of Bush, and Clinton instead of Trump, and likely some very different history.

Now look across the Channel to Great Britain, and the Prime Minister’s call for a “snap” election. This concept is radically alien to us Americans, where fixed terms for office are more or less universal. In this case, May brushed aside her own promise not to go to the polls until 2020, arguing that she needed a clear mandate to proceed with the “Brexit” divorce from the European Union. Under a 2011 law, she no longer has the power to call an election unilaterally, as previous prime ministers did, but can still do so if two-thirds of the House of Commons approves, which in this case is a near-certainty.