How messy will it get? There are three possible outcomes. Start with the extremely unlikely one, which is a vote so close that Kamala Harris and Mr Trump tie in the electoral college. Were this to happen, the next president would be picked by the House of Representatives, with each state wielding one vote. Even if Ms Harris won the popular vote on November 5th, Mr Trump would almost certainly become president. That would be fair in the sense that it would follow the rules, but Democrats would be furious.
The second outcome is a Trump win. Democrats could bring legal challenges in close states where Ms Harris lost. Some of these might end up at the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Mr Trump would have to adjudicate their merits. Three of the conservative justices worked on George W. Bush’s legal team back in 2000 on Bush v Gore. That would make it hard to persuade Ms Harris’s supporters that decisions favouring the Trump campaign were impartial. After the court’s rulings on abortion and presidential immunity, Democrats have come to view the justices as Republican politicians in robes. Nevertheless, most elected Democrats would probably accept the rulings, if more grudgingly than in 2000.
However, if enough Democratic lawmakers were really convinced the courts had acted unfairly, they could try to block certification of the result in Congress, following the precedent set by Republicans in 2021. Then, 139 House members and eight senators (all Republicans) voted to reject the results. A reform of the Electoral Count Act, passed two years ago, raises the threshold, so that 20 senators and 87 members of the House would have to object. In the unlikely scenario that those preliminary votes passed, Democrats would probably lose the subsequent full votes of both chambers. All this is possible, but the most probable outcome, if Mr Trump were to win the election, is that Ms Harris would concede, taking the wind out of any Democratic challenge to the result.
If Ms Harris wins, Mr Trump will not be so gracious. In that third scenario, the complexity of America’s voting system collides with the MAGA conspiracy machine.
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