The race for the White House is in the home stretch, and the two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are running neck and neck. When it comes to the most salient issue for voters - the economy - Harris has narrowed the gap with her opponent in recent months, but Trump retains a slight lead.

It is a lead Trump does not deserve, argues New York University's Nouriel Roubini. Harris and Trump differ sharply on "fiscal, trade, climate, immigration, currency, and China policies," and it is Trump's agenda that is "much more likely to cause inflation, reduce economic growth (through tariffs, a currency depreciation, and immigration restrictions), and blow up the budget." So far, however, "markets have not priced in the damage that Trump would do to the economy and markets."

For Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, the contrast between the two candidates boils down to freedom. "On every big issue in this election" - from women's bodily autonomy to high drug and housing prices - "Harris would expand Americans' freedoms, and Trump would curtail them." Harris's agenda, centered on a "commitment to help ordinary Americans," is a far cry from the "discredited trickle-down economics" that Trump is hawking.

That might be the point. Far from seeking to lead a free and prosperous America, the New School's Nina L. Khrushcheva explains, Trump has shown that he would be a "dangerous dictator eager to rule over a weak, divided, and paranoid society." Nowhere is this more apparent than in his promise to pursue the "largest deportation effort in American history" - a "policy of state terror" from which undocumented immigrants would be "only the first to suffer."

This is one reason why Edoardo Campanella, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, concludes that another Trump presidency would "intensify" a decades-old "battle to restore America's historical racial and political hierarchy." Even if Trump loses, however, "demographic trends, a Trumpified Republican Party, and counter-majoritarian constitutional rules" imply that American democracy will be "highly dysfunctional in the years ahead."

A Harris victory might not end America's crisis of democracy, but the University of Chicago's Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq point out that it would stave off the kind of direct attacks on institutions that autocratic movements tend to mount when they "gain control of the state's machinery a second time." If recent experience in Hungary, India, and Poland is any guide, a second Trump administration would be more "ruthless and effective" at "wielding - and maintaining - power."

There is good reason to think that Trump will handle even an electoral loss like an autocrat: by refusing to accept it. As the University of Chicago's John Mark Hansen observes, Trump has recently revived his baseless allegation that the 2020 election was "rigged" and that he, not Joe Biden, was the real winner. His goal is to "obscure his own malfeasance," intimidate his opponents by "threatening to prosecute them," and perhaps to "suborn his supporters who hold positions in election administration into committing fraud" on his behalf.

If Trump poses such a profound threat to America's economy, society, and democracy, how has he gained so much support? Reed Galen, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project and President of JoinTheUnion.us, points the finger at a media machine that has been "flooding America's living rooms" with "highly addictive right-wing propaganda" for decades. Even if Harris wins, this "media monster" will grow only "louder, uglier, and more unwieldy," - underscoring the need for Americans to "do the hard work" to "ensure that we don't find ourselves back here, yet again, in 2028."

From Project Syndicate