How could a postdoc look competitive against a tenured professor?
You are a serious candidate

You are. That is why the university is interviewing you. It would be a complete waste of time and resources otherwise. They liked your application materials and want to know more.

Candidates must have good potential

Generally, academic hires are made not on the basis of what you have done but on what you have the potential to do. This is why the job doesn't automatically go to the person with the most publications.

Search committee members know how academia works

Of course the tenured professor has more publications than you! Of course they have more teaching and advising experience, and of course they have more contacts and a wider network within the field. The search committee knows this, and they don't expect postdocs to have all of these things. But perhaps the postdoc looks like they have the potential to blossom into a better scholar than the tenured professor. Perhaps the tenured professor will just stagnate. Which brings me to my final point...

You have seriously incomplete information

You have basically no knowledge which could help you figure out your odds. Here are some possible scenarios:


The tenured professor (who I'll call P for brevity) is not actually serious about this job, but just wants an offer so that she can have a counteroffer from her current institution to get a nice raise.
P is fleeing from a toxic department; she is on bad terms with her current department chair.
P is leaving her current department because she is effectively being pushed out due to a scandal involving an affair with a student and misappropriation of research funds. This is hot gossip among the more senior members of your field but no one knows the full details.
P is applying for the position to live close to her ageing parents. She thinks that she will easily get the job because she is from a prestigious university and this job is at a mid tier school, however her arrogance poisons the interview and no one likes her.
P is the best candidate on paper, but just doesn't "click" week with the current faculty, so they vote to hire someone else.


We can go on like this for all the candidates, including you. Then we can invent scenarios of what the search committee is looking for, pet peeves of individual members, and so on. But the fact is we just don't know, and even if we did know then there's nothing you can do about it.

Get back to work

Quit worrying. Use that nervous energy to polish your talk, to practice answering questions, and to do research about the school. The job goes to the best candidate, and that could be you.