Kamala Harris should have a cakewalk to the Oval Office. At least, that’s what the stock market says. It’s surged to record highs since the vice president entered the race in July, which has historically been very good news for incumbent candidates.
In reality, of course, polls show a virtual dead heat, with prediction markets signaling recent momentum for Donald Trump as the race enters its final days. As the chart below shows, a Harris loss would be just the third time since World War II that a candidate representing the fortunes of an incumbent party hasn’t been correlated to the performance of the stock market. The outliers are Dwight Eisenhower's victory in 1956, and the respective losses of Hubert Humphrey and Jimmy Carter in 1968 and 1980:
