Who’s normal, Trump or Harris?

Mr. Trump entered U.S. politics in 2015 as a hurricane of disruption. In debates and primaries, he rolled over more traditional Republican opponents, insulting them and promising big changes, most memorably that he’d build “a wall" along the southern border. He then beat, barely, his establishment Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. His term produced traditional public policy but also constant tumult. Four years later, the electorate’s appetite shifted from disruption to stability.

Another agent of disruption emerged but this time from within the Democratic Party. Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders achieved a surprising early lead in the presidential primaries. Fearing that the degree of progressive change Sen. Sanders was offering would scare too many voters, the party establishment anointed Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s former vice president. (This election may end the party’s vice-presidential-nominee fixation.)

Mr. Biden, a careful-sounding creature of the slow-moving U.S. Senate, ran on returning the country to normalcy. It’s hard to recall anything of substance he campaigned on other than replacing what came to be known as the Trump chaos. By a slim margin, the Biden normalcy pitch brought him into the presidency.

Now with the 2024 election only weeks away, the nation seems to be teetering on a political seesaw over what it wants in the next presidency. Riding on one side are voters who say they want stability and normalcy. On the other sits a rowdier bunch who want disruption and change, which includes a willingness to take apart the existing system. The Democratic left, led by members of the Senate, wants to remake the Supreme Court. Some on the Trump-supporting right want to dismantle the Justice Department, and that’s for starters.

Ms. Harris is pitching herself to suburban voters as the calm, sane alternative to Mr. Trump. But last year, the Biden-Harris administration Education Department proposed revising Title IX to forbid K-12 schools and colleges from adopting a policy that “categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity." It’s on hold for now, but do parents in suburban high schools want “change" that lets boys compete in sports against their daughters? Nothing incremental about that.

It is conventional wisdom that Trump-supporting voters are complicit in an assault on “democracy." But most of these voters are conservative traditionalists or right-leaning centrists who are mainly opposed to the political and social disruptions caused by what they call “wokeness." For them, Mr. Trump aligns with their notions of stability.

Ms. Harris has drawn criticism lately for finding no policy differences between herself and Mr. Biden’s unpopular presidency, as she admitted on “The View." But there’s no reason to be surprised that she is basically rerunning the Biden election playbook from 2020.

Like Mr. Biden, she is campaigning as the anti-Trump. Ms. Harris devoted her rally in Erie, Pa., this week almost entirely to an attack on Mr. Trump’s character and intentions—“dictator on day one," etc., etc. It’s a crude strategy but after such close results in 2016 and 2020, the razor-thin polling margins in so many swing states suggest the Clinton-Biden-Harris strategy of running against Mr. Trump remains viable.

Even so, there’s little reason to believe Ms. Harris isn’t promising the same fake post-Trump normalcy that Mr. Biden did. With the election won, Mr. Biden adopted the left-wing policy agenda of Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Even as Ms. Harris casts herself as less disruptive to American life than Mr. Trump, she came out this week for legalizing marijuana and giving cannabis-store licenses to people with drug convictions, a policy already wrecking neighborhoods in New York.

The Biden-Harris idea that Mr. Trump’s presidency was four years of chaos deserves some inspection. Before the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in early 2020, the day-to-day activities of the Trump administration itself hardly qualified as chaos. Who remembers the passage of the Trump tax bill in 2017 or the 2020 approval of the Keystone XL pipeline? What’s recalled instead from Inauguration Day onward are the media’s Russian-collusion narrative, the Mueller investigation and the Democratic House’s impeachments. Should Mr. Trump get a second chance at the presidency without this political carpet-bombing? That won’t happen unless voters give Republicans control of Congress. A decisive Republican sweep would be one road to relative political stability, giving Democrats time to rethink their leadership.

But a caveat: It isn’t clear Mr. Trump himself wants political stability, even if elected. Would he settle down in a second term, or does he need sparring partners to keep himself interested? Would his attack rallies stop? Might undecided voters conclude Mr. Trump is inherently volatile?

There is another path voters may choose to a more settled daily politics: They could elect Ms. Harris president while giving Republicans control of the Senate and House. Today, that’s derided as gridlock. But it’s possible the American people in their wisdom will impose a cooling-off period of divided government.

Write henninger@wsj.com.