, Columnist
Why It's Hard for Le Pen to Pull a Trump
The French nationalist may succeed in driving down turnout, but her path to victory is narrower.
Turning out a victory.
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Can Marine Le Pen still win the French election if her opponents don't vote in the run-off vote on May 7? After many potential Hillary Clinton voters, certain of her victory, failed to turn out last year, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, so, by analogy, such an outcome seems somewhat possible. Yet there are strong reasons why the French election is different from the U.S. one and Le Pen's potential path to victory is much narrower than Trump's.
The first of these reasons is that French pollsters have done a far better job in predicting election results than their peers in the U.S.