American Elections

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• havo
• Leerjaar 5

In a nutshell

When?                      On Tuesday, 5 November 2024. 

What?                       The winner becomes the president and will serve a term of four years in the                                             White House.

Starting?                 In January 2025.

Job description? The president has the power to pass some laws on their own but mostly he or                                         she must work with Congress to pass legislation.

                                     On the world stage, the US president has considerable freedom to represent                                           the country abroad and to conduct foreign policy.

Who's leading the polls?

Electoral college system

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they're not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That's because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population.

A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.       

source: BBC

What is the electoral college?

When Americans take part in November's presidential election, most of them will cast a vote for either Democrat Kamala Harris or Republican Donald Trump.

But those votes don't directly determine who wins. Instead of a national race it's a state-by-state race.

Generally, states award all their electoral college votes to whoever wins the poll of ordinary voters in the state.

For example, if a candidate wins 50.1% of the vote in Texas, they are given all of the state's 40 electoral votes. A candidate who won a state by a landslide would still pick up the same number of electoral votes.

source: BBC

Winning one of the 50 states means that candidate collects all the so-called electoral college votes. There are 538 electoral college votes in total.

 

A candidate needs to gain a majority of the votes - 270 or more - to win the presidency. Their running mate becomes the vice-president.

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