A look at plausible outcomes that might wind up seeming obvious in hindsight.
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% of voters approved of President Joe Biden’s performance, and just 28% 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 former President Donald 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 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.
If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.
Democrats have won election after election since Trump’s upset victory in 2016. They beat him in 2020, and it’s arguably gone even better for them since January 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 top-two primary – a sort of election year Groundhog Day for political junkies.
Yes, the electorate is wary of the status quo, but the usual rules haven’t applied since January 6, 2021, and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. If people go into the voting booth thinking of abortion, January 6 and threats to democracy – as they have over the last few years – Harris could win decisively. In the final Times/Siena national poll, she had a 13-percentage-point lead on abortion and a seven-point lead on democracy.
Could Trump be repudiated with a decisive loss? It’s hardly out of the question. For one, there’s a chance that pollsters have overcompensated for failing to reach his supporters in recent elections.
For another, Trump’s strength rests on shaky ground. He needs to get disaffected, young, Black and Hispanic voters to turn out and vote for a very different candidate than they would have in the past. If these disaffected voters return to Harris or simply don’t show up, the race could look different very quickly.
And finally, the race turned toward democracy down the stretch. This is partly because the election itself naturally raises questions about whether Trump and his allies will accept the results. Trump has drawn attention to the issue with remarks about using the military against an “enemy within”. His former chief of staff John Kelly also recently said Trump fit the definition of a fascist.
It wouldn’t take much for the election to feel like a blowout for Harris. If she outperformed her poll numbers by a mere two points, she would win well over 300 votes in the Electoral College. Given where Democrats were a few months ago, even a modest victory would feel like a landslide.
There’s no reason she couldn’t outperform by even more. After all, the polls show her doing quite well among white and older voters – which, for Democrats, would usually count as the big challenge. On Saturday night, the final Selzer/Des Moines Register poll offered perhaps the most striking illustration yet of that potential strength: Harris led by three points in solidly red state Iowa. It may not pan out, but she can fall well short of “blue Iowa” and it would still count as a decisive rebuke of MAGA.
If you added the usual Democratic margins among young, Black and Hispanic voters to strength among older white voters, suddenly there are the makings of a rout. The final Times/Siena battleground polls showed her making late gains among exactly these groups.
In today’s polarised United States, what could be less surprising than a more-or-less repeat of the 2020 election: yet another close election across the battleground states, with few swings from four years ago?
After all, Trump is on the ballot for a third straight time. Voters may hem and haw, but it’s easy to see how they might mostly vote as they did last time, yielding a result a lot like 2020.
That’s essentially what the polls depict today: a tiny gap of a point or two in the same seven battleground states where Biden and Trump finished within a few points of each other four years ago.
You might think a 2020 repeat means a Harris victory, but that’s not what I mean. She might win the “2020 repeat” election more often than not, but this scenario isn’t about an exact repeat of the last election. The 2020 race was so close in the Electoral College that it wouldn’t take too many shifts to change the outcome. Even a modest dip in support or turnout for Harris among young, black or Hispanic voters could be enough to put Trump over the top.
Biden won each of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by less than 1 point – in a 2020 repeat, Harris would need at least one of those states to prevail.
Harris could be a slight favourite in a 2020 repeat scenario. But whoever wins, the election would be very close.
Of the four scenarios, perhaps this is the one that was hardest to see coming. Historically, there isn’t much reason to think midterm elections have much predictive value for the next presidential election.
Yet the polls suggest that the 2024 election might look more like the 2022 midterms than the 2020 race: an election where different states, regions and demographic groups swing significantly, but in different directions.
For one, national polls show a much tighter race than four years ago, even as Harris remains competitive in the key battlegrounds. This is also what happened in the 2022 midterms, when Republicans won the popular vote but struggled in the key states.
For another, many polls show Trump faring well in the same places where Republicans excelled in the midterms, like in New York and Florida. Conversely, Harris is showing more resilience across the relatively white Northern battleground states where Democrats excelled in 2022.
Why would the midterms have been a harbinger of a changing electoral map? It was the first election after the pandemic and all the upheaval that followed – including January 6, the end of Roe, the debate over “woke,” a crime spike and surging prices. Many of these issues were also deeply personal, from school closures and vaccine mandates to the feeling of being priced out of a first home.
Unlike many national policy debates, many of these issues played out differently state by state. In New York, abortion rights were safely protected by Democratic rule, but a crime wave hit the subways and new migrants burdened the city’s resources. In Michigan, meanwhile, the stop-the-steal movement raged, and the end of Roe v. Wade threatened abortion rights.
Or maybe Harris really is doing quite well in states like Iowa or Nebraska, where voters have focused on Republican excesses and abortion bans, even as the success of Democrats in Wisconsin and Michigan oddly helped to take abortion off the table.
Another factor: the campaign. While Democratic-leaning voters can take out their frustration with the status quo by casting ballots in New York or California, voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan might have a different perspective. In these key states, Democrats have spent millions on ads, knocked on thousands of doors, and the voters themselves know the stakes. At a time when Democrats are counting on voters to set aside their frustrations with the status quo, perhaps the campaign is exactly what might make the battlegrounds different from the rest of the country.
Whether it’s a 2022 or 2020 repeat, the takeaway is the same: a very close election in which either side can prevail. Consider that Republicans won the House popular vote in states worth more than 270 electoral votes in 2022, even as Democrats won the key Senate races.
Still, the differences between a 2020 and 2022 repeat matter. In the 2022 scenario, Harris would have a much worse chance of winning the popular vote. She might also face a steeper challenge in the relatively diverse Sun Belt battleground states, like Georgia or Arizona. Without the Sun Belt, her chances would come down to running the table in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It’s possible, but a tall order.
If Trump wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.
On paper, this election should be a Republican victory. After all, Biden’s approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, voters are convinced that the country is heading in the wrong direction, and they don’t think the economy is in good shape. These are losing numbers for the president’s party, and ruling parties have been toppled in election after election all over the world.
The signs of a Republican victory have been building for years. For the first time since 2004, the highest-quality polls show Republicans with an advantage in party identification. The party registration figures have also trended significantly toward the Republicans, with registered Republicans poised to outnumber Democrats in the November electorate in every battleground state with party registration: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.
While Democrats have fared well in recent lower-turnout elections, it’s mostly been because of their support among high-turnout voters. Trump’s more disengaged base is likelier to show up in this high-turnout election. And indeed in state after state, the early vote is far more Republican than it was in the past. Democrats hope to counter with a stronger turnout on election day than in recent cycles, but if they do not the election could quickly become a rout.
No, the polls don’t show a Trump blowout, but what could be less surprising than the polls underestimating Trump, just as they did in 2016 or 2020? The pollsters never found a convincing explanation for what went wrong, and the simplest one is that they just can’t reach enough of Trump’s less engaged supporters. Despite their efforts over the last eight years, there may simply be no fix for this problem.
In this scenario, Harris’ apparent strength among white and older voters, or her resilience in the Midwestern battlegrounds, is nothing more than another polling mirage – in exactly the same states where the polls got it wrong four and eight years ago. Add in Trump’s gains among young, Black and Hispanic voters and you end up with a decisive victory for him. It would mark the beginning of a new era of politics.
Is “realignment” too strong a word? If we’re talking strictly about 2024, then yes. It might be fairer to call a decisive Trump victory a “change election,” like 1992 or 2008.
But if the three Trump elections are viewed collectively, the “R” word ought to be in the conversation. The rise of Trump’s brand of conservative populism has transformed American politics. It redefined the basic political conflict between the two parties. It led to major demographic shifts, first with Trump making huge gains among the white working class and now with non-white voters, while Democrats gained among white college graduates.
If the shifts endure after Trump, historians might well look back and say the 2024 result was the culmination of the populist realignment he unleashed a decade ago.
It has long been clear that Trump’s rise destroyed the Republican Party as we knew it. This scenario would reveal the extent that it destroyed the Democratic Party as we knew it, too.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nate Cohn
Photographs by: Jamie Kelter Davis, Emily Elconin, Doug Mills, Jamie Kelter Davis and Tom Brenner
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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