There are just over two weeks left until November 5. Elections in the United States will be decided by a very fair margin, to the point where the paradox could arise that Kamala Harris would win the popular vote and lose the White House if Donald Trump wins in the key states that give him a majority in the College. .Electoral.
The electoral college is made up of 538 delegates. To win, one of the candidates must receive at least 270 votes from the electoral college. The figure of 538 is not random and is equivalent to the number of members of the House of Representatives (435) plus the number of senators (100) plus three delegates for Washington, DC, which has no representatives in either chamber.
Delegates are distributed by state and the winning party in each territory wins the entire number of delegates allocated to that state, except in Maine (4) and Nebraska (3), where the system is proportional. With these two exceptions, it doesn’t matter whether you win a state by one vote or by a million: if you win, you get all the electoral votes in that state, and the loser in that state gets nothing.
The polls currently present a very tense scenario, with a slight advantage for Kamala Harris. In the following chart you can see how they are based on the average of surveys published by FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates different surveys and gives a different weight by date, sample size, methodology, transparency or bias of each polling station.
Harris is in the lead with a little more than two points ahead of Trump, in a race in which Biden’s withdrawal was decisive: Harris has been rising in the polls since taking on the presidential race compared to to the one who is still president, even if the gap has narrowed in the last week.
Donald Trump, for his part, distances himself from Kamala Harris in Arizona and does the same in Georgia and North Carolina, two contested states.
Precisely in Arizona, the Republican managed to reverse the polls and is ahead of Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden won this state with 49.4% of the vote and a margin of about 10,000 votes behind Trump.
The following map presents the victory forecasts for each candidate, according to the FiveThirtyEight model, which takes into account not only the polls but also the voting history, economic and social data of each state to simulate the victory probabilities of each candidate . According to this model, victory in the 2024 elections will be decided in the seven key states currently undecided.
The other two battleground states where Trump appears in the lead are Georgia and North Carolina. In 2020, Biden managed to win in Georgia by around 11,000 votes, a close score of 49.5%, compared to 49.2% for the Republican.
In North Carolina, even if Trump continues to lead, the possibility of a color change this November 5 is not excluded. In 2020, the Republican managed to win by around 75,000 votes.
The following table summarizes the evolution of the race in the polls of the seven states where the battle is tightest and which will decide the 2024 elections in the United States.
Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are three swing states. It’s possible that Harris could win the White House without them, although that would be a very difficult scenario. For Trump, Georgia and North Carolina are more critical. For now, Pennsylvania continues to be seen as the place that will have the last laugh and in this state, Harris continues to lead with little difference.
