With the 2024 race seemingly frozen and super-close, let’s consider some scenarios.

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The Trump-Biden rematch is too close (40.8 percent to 40.3 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling average on Wednesday) to handicap with confidence, and too frozen (Trump’s barely statistically significant lead has held for months) to deliver much horse-race drama. But if the candidates remain as neck-and-neck as they currently appear, some unexpected things could happen after the polls close in November. Three wild-card outcomes deserve closer consideration.

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 —........

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