USA will elect its new president next time Tuesday November 5 during elections which promise to be very close. The polls are showing very close results, which is why Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump have tightened the electoral campaign to win votes in the states which will be decisive.
The American electoral system has major particularities. Voters do not vote directly for the president, but for the delegates who make up the Electoral Collegebody responsible for then electing the new president by absolute majority.
In the US presidential elections, a total of 538 delegates, distributed among the 50 states proportionally, according to the population of each of them. The District of Columbia also has 3 electors, although it is not a state.
In each state, the candidate who wins a majority of the popular votes wins all the electoral votes allocated to him, regardless of the proportion of votes obtained by the rest of the candidates. This system is known as winner takes all (“winner takes all”) and applies in 48 states and the District of Columbia.
The only two states that do not use the system of winner takes all are Maine and Nebraska. In their case, they use a proportional distribution system in which each voter is rewarded for each congressional district won, and the state’s overall winner gets two additional electors (corresponding to the two senators).
These are the 7 “Visagra States”
The American electoral system makes states in which the outcome is unclear decisive. Thus, parties tend to focus your campaign efforts where the balance can tip in favor of one or the other of the two candidates.
Swing States either “Hinge States” This is the name given to states in which the population is traditionally divided and there is no clear winning candidate, which is why they are essential for parties. In total, there are seven: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
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Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes): The current governor, Josh Shapiro, is a Democrat. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 49.8% of the vote, compared to Donald Trump’s 48.9%. The state is considered the most coveted item by both Democrats and Republicans and is one of three, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, in which the state and national winner of the last four presidential elections coincided.
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Michigan (15 electoral votes): its governor Gretchen Whitmer is also a Democrat. In the last election, Biden won all state-owned delegates, with 50.5% of the vote, just 2.6 points more than Trump (47.9%). After Pennsylvania, it is the state most visited by the two candidates in recent weeks.
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Georgia (16 electoral votes): The current governor, Brian Kemp, is a Republican. And it’s a state with a strong Republican tradition, in which a third of potential voters are black. However, in 2020, Biden won all the votes by just three-tenths difference compared to Trump (49.5 to 49.2%). The result was so unusual that the former president forced a second recount and pushed the electoral system to the limit.
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Arizona (11 electoral votes): Its governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat. This is the fifth state that Biden has managed to take from Trump in 2020, by only three tenths (49.4 against 49.1%), which has not happened since 1996.
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Snowfall (6 electoral votes): governed by Republican Joe Lombardo. In 2020, Biden won 50.2% of the vote, compared to Donald Trump’s 47.5%. Of all the decisive states, it is the one that delivers the fewest delegates to the Electoral College. However, neither candidate can ignore it.
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Wisconsin (10 electoral votes): Democrat Tony Evers is the governor of this state, where Biden won the last US elections with 49.5% of the vote, compared to 48.8% for Trump, who won four years earlier . Milwaukee, the state’s most populous city, hosted the Republican convention in July, while Kamala Harris chose it to hold her first rally.
- North Carolina (16 electoral votes): It is one of the states with a strong Republican tradition, although it is governed by Democrat Roy Cooper. The Democrats have only managed to win twice in half a century: Jimmy Carter (1976) and Barack Obama (2008). In 2020, Trump won all the votes with 50%, compared to Biden’s 48.6%. Four years later, the former president must keep it at all costs.
Thus, the results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina will be decisive for the election of the next American president. Together they represent more than 90 votes in the Electoral College -the majority is set at 270- and a small handful of votes can tilt the final result.
Most surveys return results very close in these states in the upcoming elections on November 5, where key issues such as immigration, the economy, employment or abortion policy will be crucial for voters.
