How the Election Could Unfold: Four Scenarios

The 2024 election is close and deeply uncertain.One reason? On paper, neither side ought to win.For Democrats, it’s a textbook challenge.In the latest New York Times/Siena College national poll, only 40 percent of voters approved of President Biden’s performance, and just 28 percent of voters said the country was heading in the right direction.

No party has ever retained control of the White House when such a small share of Americans think the country is doing well.The challenge for Donald J.Trump is much more unusual, but equally obvious: He’s a felon who attempted to overturn the last election.

Usually, this would be disqualifying — and Mr.Trump still faces several more criminal cases.For good measure, each side has another major (and largely self-inflicted) vulnerability on an important issue: abortion for Republicans, immigration for Democrats.Nonetheless, one candidate is going to win this thing.If the final result resembles the polls, all strengths and weaknesses will more or less cancel out, yielding yet another close election.

There are reasons to think, however, that the race might break one way or another.The polls may show a tight race now, but they could err either way.

Even if the polls are better this cycle, voters still might summarily decide that one side’s liabilities are more important as they head to the polls.Here are four scenarios for what could happen in this election.They’re all plausible — so plausible that each might seem obvious in hindsight.The repudiationIf Kamala Harris wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.Democrats have won election after election since Mr.

Trump’s upset victory in 2016.They beat him in 2020, and it’s arguably gone even better for them since Jan.

6.They’ve excelled in special elections and overperformed in the midterms (given the tendency for a midterm backlash against the party holding the presidency).

They even fared well in this year’s Washington State’s top-two primary �...