Opinion | Three potential wild cards for a razor-close Biden-Trump election (2024)

The first is the possibility that Trump ekes out the most votes — and loses the presidency. Yes, it’s unlikely; FiveThirtyEight’s data wizards assign this possibility a 1-in-100 chance, compared with an 11-in-100 chance that Biden loses despite a popular-vote lead. But the winner-take-all electoral college is a fickle institution. It tilted toward Democrats in 2012, only to deliver the presidency to Trump in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote plurality.

There are some signs the GOP’s alleged “structural advantage” in elections — its propensity to win more political power than its raw vote totals would suggest — is slipping. In the 2022 midterms, Republican candidates won 3 million more votes than Democrats in races for the House of Representatives. That decisive margin that would have yielded an overwhelming GOP House majority in previous elections. Yet Republicans only barely won control of the chamber. It turned out that the GOP coalition was less geographically “efficient” than it had been during the 2010s.

Could a similar dynamic manifest in the electoral college in 2024? It’s not currently apparent in swing-state polling. But if Trump did end up coming up short in electoral votes despite a strong popular-vote performance, it would likely be because he overperformed in solidly Democratic states without actually winning them.

For example, it’s safe to say Biden will easily win New York’s electoral votes this November. But while Biden won the state by 23 percentage points in 2020, some recent polls have shown a single-digit race there. It’s also possible to imagine Trump’s widely reported demographic inroads among Hispanics cutting into Biden’s margin in California without affecting the electoral college result.

Partisan views of the electoral college have been polarized since 2000, with the institution more popular among Republicans. Democrats are more likely to decry it as an instrument of “minority rule.” If Biden secured a second term despite failing to again win the most votes, Trump would cry foul and Democrats would rejoice. Would views of the institution flip? Or would efforts to change it gain momentum?

Then there’s the possibility that Trump wins the presidency but Democrats hold the Senate. Most analysts take for granted that a Trump victory would come with a Republican Senate majority. That’s certainly a very good bet. States usually vote for the same party for senator and president.

But as the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter has pointed out, there is a surprising divergence between presidential and Senate polling this cycle. Republican Senate candidates are losing in a number of states that Trump is winning. In Cook’s Nevada poll, for example, Trump leads Biden by nine points while the Republican Senate candidate is trailing incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen by seven. “Democratic Senate candidates aren’t paying as big a price for voters’ economic frustrations” as Biden is, Walter writes, “while Republicans have not created separation between themselves and Trump’s most problematic positions.”

There probably are not enough split-ticket voters in states such as Ohio, Montana and Florida to give Trump the presidency and Democrats continued control of the Senate. But peculiar polling trends at least raise the possibility. That would make for an extraordinary second Trump term. Trump’s Cabinet picks would be at the mercy of the Democratic Party, and few if any federal judges could be confirmed. The power struggle between the White House and Congress would likely reach new levels of intensity.

Finally, consider the possibility of an electoral college tie, throwing the election to the House of Representatives. FiveThirtyEight’s model gets that result in about five out of 1,000 simulations. One route to a 269-269 electoral college split would be Trump winning back Pennsylvania and Michigan from Biden’s 2020 column and the map otherwise staying the same.

The House would then break the tie as the 12th Amendment requires. But that doesn’t mean the majority party in the House would necessarily get its way. The amendment says “in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.” It’s possible, for example, that Democrats win control of the House but that Republicans make up a majority in more state delegations.

The process hasn’t been tested since the election of 1824, and could be vulnerable to procedural subterfuge. In a brief in the Supreme Court case on whether the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot disqualified Trump from the ballot, election law specialists considered what might happen in case of an electoral college tie:

“To start, the House would need to establish rules for conducting the election ... Democrats in the House would have a partisan incentive to adopt a rule provision first requiring a majority vote on each candidate’s qualification to hold office. If they held a majority of the House, Democrats could sustain an objection to Mr. Trump’s candidacy on Section 3 grounds and exclude him from the ballot in its Twelfth Amendment election.”

That warning rings true. Next Jan. 6, when the new Congress would resolve the matter, if Democrats hold the House majority — and especially if Biden had just prevailed in the popular vote — would they really allow the House Republican minority to elect Trump under the process prescribed by the 12th Amendment, enacted in 1804?

These scenarios are all unlikely. But the probability of each increases in the event of a close presidential race. If there’s any common lesson from them, it’s that narrow electoral margins put strain on the political and governing processes. A healthy political party would defeat either Trump or Biden decisively. But alternating razor-thin margins might be all our current dilapidated parties can deliver. Buckle up for the fallout.