We’ve got three more weeks until elections in the United States. After that, we have until January 20th to figure out who the president is. Whatever ends up happening will have profound effects on Las Vegas casinos for the foreseeable future.

Usually, either the Democrat wins, or the Republican wins. I believe the best scenario for Las Vegas is that Joe Biden wins, because it will increase the chances that lockdowns and business restrictions will end sooner, which will of course be best for the casinos fundamentally. If Donald Trump wins, then chances increase that the lockdown regimes will drag on further, snuffing out whatever remains of economic activity. That may sound counterintuitive, given that Biden is the so-called “lockdown candidate” saying he would institute national lockdowns if advised to do so, while Trump has so far resisted national lockdowns and will continue to resist them. Still, I stand by my reasoning, which I’ll explain in a minute. First, the third and by far the worst scenario short term for stocks must be dealt with.

The third scenario is that we have a long, drawn-out contested election where nobody clearly wins and there are mutual recriminations of fraud and an attempted coup and all the rest, into and perhaps even past the January 20 transition of power. With the amount of mail-in ballots this time around given the pandemic mentality of much of the electorate, it’s going to take a significant amount of time to count it all, and recriminations of mail and voter fraud are inevitable.

If we do indeed see that third scenario play out, it would be a disaster for stocks, and I’m not talking about a simple lack of political certainty here per se. I’m talking about the immediate consequences for the fiscal and monetary side of the equation. I’m talking about a literal constitutional inability of Congress to keep borrowing and spending money at light speed, simply because there would be no recognized presidential authority to sign the spending bills past January. In that case, the life support that government spending has temporarily extended to capital markets, will be cut off, and we could be back in a March crash situation.