Opinion | Why I Still Think Trump Will Win

This week my colleague David Brooks and I offered dispatches from two different futures: One in which Kamala Harris edges out Donald Trump for the presidency, and one in which Trump is victorious. I wrote the “How Harris Wins” narrative, exploring a scenario in which the Democratic nominee succeeds in her effort to Marie Kondo-fy progressive politics, tidying things up by reducing the Democratic agenda to just a few popular components, and letting that simplified, joy-sparking platform expose the internal tensions of the Republican Party’s coalition of the discontented.

That’s a vision of what could happen, and I think that Harris has a good chance to win in exactly the way that I describe. But if you forced me to place a bet on what will happen, my current expectations are closer to the scenario offered by my colleague — in which Trump, not Harris, is the next president of the United States.

One might argue that the safest way to bet is simply not to make one. As of this writing Harris leads slightly in one of the popular betting markets, PredictIt, and Trump in another, Polymarket; in other words, for people making real wagers, it’s a tossup. The RealClearPolitics polling average in Pennsylvania, the most likely decisive state, is a tie. The election forecaster Nate Silver’s complex model gives Trump a 60 percent chance of victory — but the forecasting at his former home, FiveThirtyEight, thinks Harris has a 57 percent chance of winning.

All this looks like the very definition of a coin-flip election. So why do I expect the coin to fall Trump’s way? Three reasons, none of them completely rigorous, and all of them shadowed by the fact that I was wrong in 2016 (when I expected Trump to lose) and wrong in 2020 (when I expected Joe Biden to win more easily than he did), so I could simply be overcompensating for underestimating Trump’s chances in the past.

First, I think if Harris were on track to win, she would be leading more decisively at the moment. She has enjoyed an extended period of extraordinarily positive media coverage while the rival ticket flailed around trying to figure out an effective line of attack. She recently had the benefit of her party’s convention, which wrapped up on Aug. 22 and was — in the press, at least — extremely positively received. And yet after those two boosts she still isn’t clearly ahead of Trump in the Electoral College race — which suggests that she probably now has more room to fall than rise.

Not that she will necessarily fall: It may be possible for her to sustain the media halo and the joyfully policy-light style for another two months, and in my essay on her path to victory that’s the future I assumed. But if the current dead heat is her ceiling, at least absent some dramatic change in the race, that’s enough reason for me to regard Trump as a very narrow favorite.