Click here to read about the purpose of our research (voting theory).

Summary of Results (Condorcet order)

This table summarizes the Mercer County Poll results, with voters separated by party. The first row lists the winner, followed by the runner-up, and so forth.

(* indicates a tie or cycle, meaning the order within the *ed group can be disputed from the data)

Survey Explanation

Princeton University has recruited a panel of volunteers in Mercer County (the county where Princeton is located) to participate in opinion surveys. We obtained permission in February, 2012, to email this panel and solicit responses to our survey about the US presidential election. The result was 288 completed surveys. Most of the survey participants were Democrats. Please see our methodology page to understand how we collected the survey responses and to see the demographic breakdown of the participants.

The survey asks for participants to give a score (between -100 and 100) to each of 11 choices for president of the United States of America, to indicate who they would pick if the choice were up to them. The choices include declared candidates as well as other such as Hillary Clinton. With this detailed information about preferences, we can compare who would win the election under several different voting systems.

Our main objective is to see if there is a Condorcet winner — a winner who would win even if any of the other candidates dropped out of the race. It turns out there is one, in this data and in pretty much all the data we look at. In this data, Barack Obama is the winner, with Hillary Clinton as second choice, according to the Condorcet method. An interesting surprise is that John Huntsman is the top choice among Republican candidates, with Mitt Romney next behind him. The fact that a Condorcet winner exists has profound implications about how we could dramatically improve our voting system, as discussed on our voting theory page.

Comparison of Voting Systems

The results of five different voting methods are shown in these tables, one in each column. The first row lists the winner, followed by the runner-up, and so forth.

Please see the first few sections of the Google Ads Poll page or the voting theory page for an explanation of the different voting systems.

Notice that range voting and Borda count select Hillary Clinton as the winner even though Barack Obama is the Condorcet winner. This means that Obama would beat Clinton if they were the only two candidates in the race, under any of these voting systems (range voters would adjust their scores in the obvious way). We see that irrelevant candidates in the race can “spoil” the result when the wrong voting system is used.

Also, notice how poorly Huntsman does in the plurality vote and instant run-off, even though he places so high in the Condorcet order.

Republican Primary Candidates Only

When we look only at the Republican candidates, as if this were a primary election, we find that the order of the candidates shifts in relation to each other under some voting systems. Only the Condorcet method can guarantee to keep the remaining candidates in the same order when other candidates are removed.

Also notice that John Huntsman is the undisputed Condorcet winner among the Rupublican candidates according to this sample, yet he still loses all four other voting systems. Plurality voting is the system used for US presidential elections, and this data shows that in this case it would elect the wrong person. Even though Huntsman beats every other candidate in a head-to-head competition, other candidates in the race spoil the election and cost him the victory. (The reason Huntsman loses instant run-off is quite technical: see methodology.)

Republican Voters

Now we look only at survey responses for people who declared to be “registered Republicans.”

Republican Primary Candidates Only (Republican voters)

It coincidentally happens that the order of the Republican candidates have not changed when we removed the other candidates. This is something we would like to always be true. Unfortunately it's not. Only the Condorcet method has this property in general, which is one reason we say that it is a robust voting system.

Democrat Voters

Now we look only at survey responses for people who declared to be “registered Democrats.”

Republican Primary Candidates Only (Democrat voters)

Notice how dramatically Huntsman moves up in the plurality vote and instant run-off when the Democrats are removed from the race.

Independent Voters

Now we look only at survey responses for people who declared that they are not registered Democrats or Republicans. Notice that the Condorcet order for Independents is almost identical to the Condorcet order for the entire surveyed population.

Republican Primary Candidates Only (Independent voters)

With only Republicans in the race, and only using the votes from Independents, Mitt Romney wins by some voting methods, but John Huntsman is the undisputed Condorcet winner. Huntsman would beat Romney head-to-head and should be declared winner.