A s we prepare to watch Donald Trump take the oath of office Monday, it’s worth bearing in mind this fact. If America had an electoral system that elected the candidate whom a majority of America’s voters preferred when compared one-on-one to each alternative, it would be Nikki Haley, not Donald Trump, who would become the new President on January 20.

Yes, we found out in November that the American electorate preferred Trump to Kamala Harris. But it would have preferred Haley over either one. Yet the existing electoral system didn’t let the nation’s voters express this preference on their November ballots.

If it had, we can be reasonably sure that more voters would have preferred Haley to Harris. Indeed, given all the “ghost” votes that Haley received in the Republican primaries—even after dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination—she likely would have received more votes against Harris than Trump did. Haley couldn’t win the GOP nomination because she was less popular among Republican voters than Trump, but she was still more popular than him among all American voters, as polls showed at the time.

For the same reason, we can be confident that more voters in November would have favored Haley over Trump if that had been the choice on their ballots. She would have received the votes of her supporters in the primaries, plus independents who preferred her to Trump. Also, between just the two of them, she would have received the votes of Democrats who, although obviously wanting Harris to win, preferred Haley to Trump as the less objectionable Republican. Harris herself would likely have been telling Democrats to vote for Haley over Trump for the same reason that Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney to highlight the special threat that Trump, in contrast to traditional Republicans like Cheney and Haley, poses to America’s democracy.

To be clear, we must envision the possibility that the November ballot would not have asked voters to choose only between Haley and Trump. It also would have let voters express their preference between Harris and Trump—and between Harris and Haley. This way, Democrats and other voters who preferred Harris above all would get to cast their ballots for Harris, in favor for her over the other two. The only question is whether, with the ballot also letting these voters express a preference between Haley and Trump, they would have left that part of the ballot blank, being indifferent between these two Republican candidates.

Given that the November ballot wasn’t structured to let voters express this preference, and given that there’s no available polling on the point, we can’t know for sure. But we can surmise that many supporters of Harris, after having the opportunity to express their preference for her over both Trump and Haley—and with Harris herself telling her voters how important it was to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office—would have been willing to cast this extra vote on their ballot in favor of Haley over Trump as the less objectionable Republican. (Note, too, that James Madison late in life envisioned this kind of three-candidate election, in which voters indicate which of each pair they favor, in order to determine “the real preference of the Voters,” as I discuss in a new piece of scholarship to be published in the Wisconsin Law Review.)

Preferred by a majority of voters over either Harris or Trump one-on-one, Haley would have been what election scholars call a “Condorcet winner,” named for French mathematician Marquis de Condorcet, who developed the principle that in a democracy the candidate most deserving to win an election is one whom a majority of voters favor over each opponent when compared head-to-head. The basic idea behind this principle is that no candidate should be declared the winner if there is another candidate whom a majority of voters would rather have win the office. Haley was that other candidate in the 2024 presidential election and thus deserved to win instead of Trump. The structure of America’s electoral system, however, blocked her from being on the ballot in November because she could not first win the Republican nomination.

People are fond of saying “elections have consequences.” But so does having a faulty electoral system that deprives voters of being able to elect the candidate whom they most want to win. If Haley were being inaugurated President instead of Trump, as she should be if the electoral system produced results that accurately matched the electorate’s overall preferences, the nation wouldn’t currently be contemplating Cabinet nominations as controversial as Pete Hegseth for Defense, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Kash Patel to head the FBI. Nor would America be facing the prospect of a President willing to seize Greenland from Denmark by force.

Moreover, America’s faulty electoral system causes Americans to misunderstand the meaning of election results. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory over Harris, many despaired that, because of persistent sexism, America might never break the glass ceiling and elect a woman President. But if America had an electoral system that let the will of the majority prevail, a woman—indeed a woman of color—would be on the cusp of the presidency now.

Americans also mistakenly think that because Trump won the national popular vote this time, and not just the Electoral College as he did in 2016, it must mean that he is now the true choice of the American people. Over and over since November, headlines and commentators have said that, like it or not, we are living in “Trump’s country now.” But it is essential to understand that a difference in the outcomes of the Electoral College and the national popular vote is not the only way that the existing electoral system distorts the results. The barrier that the primaries pose for getting on the general election ballot can also cause the winner of the national popular vote to be a different candidate than the Condorcet winner, who would have won the national popular vote against either major-party nominee head-to-head, as Haley would have.

We would be living in Haley’s America now, not Trump’s, if the electoral system did not produce this kind of distortion, and that would be a very different experience. To be sure, Haley’s America would also be very different from Harris’s—as it should be in a democracy, since the voters repudiated the Biden-Harris Administration (albeit narrowly). But if American policy turns hard right in Trump’s second term, it won’t be because a majority of Americans embraced Trump’s MAGA agenda. Instead, it would represent the failure of American democracy to properly reflect the popular will.

To make American democracy produce results in line with what the voters truly want, it is necessary to reform the electoral system to be consistent with Condorcet’s principle that no candidate should win whenever there is another whom a majority would prefer. The easiest way to do this is to let voters in November directly express their preferences for each pair of candidates (as Madison contemplated). In a three-way race involving Trump, Harris, and Haley, the ballot would list all three choices—Trump versus Harris, Harris versus Haley, and Trump versus Haley—allowing voters to cast their vote in each pairing. The candidate receiving more votes against each opponent would be the Condorcet winner and elected President.

It’s possible to conduct an election with more than three candidates in a way to identify the Condorcet winner, but the procedure would be more complicated, just as a round-robin sports tournament with four competitors requires six head-to-head matches, and one with five competitors requires ten (and so forth). One can use ranked-choice ballots to streamline the procedure for voters, and then construct the head-to-head matches between each pair of candidates by examining their relative position on each ballot (the candidate ranked higher in each pair wins the head-to-head match). But introducing ranked-choice ballots into this system is itself a complexity, one that is not popular with voters, as evidenced by the defeat of proposals to adopt them in various states last fall. It would be better just to confine the November ballot to the top three candidates, and have the voters express their preferences directly with respect to each of the three pairs (A versus B, B versus C, A versus C). For that, of course, there would need to be an antecedent step in the electoral process to identify the top three finalists. In last year’s presidential election, that antecedent step would have identified Trump, Harris, and Haley as the top three.

Condorcet himself understood that theoretically there could be a situation in which no candidate beats both opponents head-to-head but instead all three candidates have one head-to-head victory and one head-to-head defeat. But subsequent scholarship has demonstrated that a three-way tie of this nature is unlikely because whenever the electorate’s preferences are linear from left to right, there necessarily will be a Condorcet winner (who is the candidate preferred by the median voter). In any event, there’s a straightforward tiebreaker if one’s ever necessary: Of the three candidates, elect the one whose single head-to-head defeat has the narrowest margin. For sake of illustration, imagine an election with these three candidates: Blue, Purple, and Red. Suppose that these are the results of the three pairwise comparisons:

Red beats Blue, 51 to 49.

Purple beats Red, 60 to 40.

Blue beats Purple, 55 to 45.

Blue’s head-to-head defeat against Red has the narrowest margin: 51-49 is much closer than 60-40 or even 55-45. Having the narrowest margin of defeat means that Blue comes closest of the three candidates to being a Condorcet winner.

It is possible to adopt this kind of Condorcet-based electoral system for presidential elections without a constitutional amendment. Doing so requires modifying the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which is a plan to make the Electoral College winner whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. The plan takes effect when states with a combined 270 or more electoral votes—the number necessary to control the Electoral College outcome—join the agreement. As of now, states with a total of 209 electoral votes have joined.

Had NPVIC been in place already, Trump still would have won. But NPVIC can be changed so that the states in the agreement award all their electoral votes to the winner of a Condorcet-based voting process that these states agree to adopt. While it will be a challenge for NPVIC in any form to reach the necessary 270 electoral votes, a Condorcet-based version of NPVIC should be attractive to any state that can form a majority coalition of Democrats, independents, and non-MAGA Republicans. If non-MAGA Republicans like Haley ever want to be able to win elections in an era where Trump and his MAGA movement dominate the Republican Party and thus control the outcome of Republican primaries, they must recognize that it is in their self-interest to adopt Condorcet-based electoral reform.

Their self-interest, fortunately, coincides with the general public interest. As long as America retains its existing electoral system, it remains dangerously vulnerable to the election of MAGA authoritarians like Trump himself when in fact voters would prefer a non-MAGA alternative like Haley. Let’s hope America has the capacity to rectify this defect in its democracy before it’s too late.