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By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

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........

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