The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes.
Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
Coming from Australia, which has a more sensible electoral system, I instinctively think about "preference flows" of the minority candidates when I look at these numbers.
Trump was 316,571 short of majority, Harris was 2,601,538.
Neither party gained an absolute majority because 2.9 million out of 155.2 million voters picked third-party candidates: 862,049 Green, 756,393 RFKJr, 650,126 Libertarian, 171,786 PSL, and 477,755 "other".
One of the many failings of the US electoral system is that it effectively ignores these 2,918,109 million voters. But, if forced to state a preference between the two majority candidates, how do you genuinely think they would've gone?
I don't think there's any question that, even just among the 756,393 people who voted for a guy actively campaigning for Trump, there are 316,571 people who would prefer a Trump presidency over a Harris presidency.
That in itself - if 100% of Greens and 100% of Libertarians, and 100% of PSL, and 100% of "other", and the other 58.14% of RFKJr voters ALL prefer Harris - is enough to grant an absolute majority to Trump.
If you plug more realistic guesstimates into preference distributions for the minor candidates, I don't think there is a plausible run-off result below 50.5-49.5 Trump out of those numbers.