If Trump Wins, Here’s Why

Former President Donald J. Trump came into Election Day with a fervent base of supporters and the experience of having already run for president twice. He also came with felony convictions and large numbers of voters who viewed him unfavorably.

He was, in short, a candidate weighed down by extraordinary baggage. But Mr. Trump drove past that, presenting himself to an electorate that was eager for change and unhappy with the direction of the country under President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Here’s what analysts will most likely be saying should he win. (And here’s a similar look at a Harris victory.)

A sour mood

By a decisive margin, voters thought the country was heading in the wrong direction — 74 percent said so, in an ABC/Ipsos poll released on Sunday morning. Since 1980, that one statistic, the number of voters who think the nation is heading in the wrong direction, has been a surefire predictor that the party in power would lose the White House.

Should he win, Mr. Trump will have succeeded in saddling Ms. Harris with President Biden’s record. And he will have appealed to voters’ unease with his dark talk about the state of the nation, and with his gauzy recollections of the supposedly better days when he was president.

The economy — or rather public perceptions of the economy — show just how uneasy voters are. Prices climbed just 2.1 percent in September over a year earlier, and the economy grew a vigorous 2.8 percent in the last quarter. But 75 percent of voters said the economy was in bad shape in a New York Times/Siena College poll in October.