Nearly 186.5 million Americans are eligible to vote for the November 5 election to choose the 47th president of the United States.
The presidential race is not the only one on the ballot. Americans will also elect people to fill various federal, state and local positions.
In the federal races, voters will choose the president and members of the two houses that make up the US Congress: the House of Representatives and Senate.
The US House of Representatives
Voters across 50 states will elect members of the House of Representatives. There are 435 seats in total and each seat is up for election every two years.
Each state’s allocated number of House members is determined by its population, so if a state loses or gains residents in a census, it stands to lose or gain seats in the House.
There are six non-voting members of the House of Representatives (called either delegates or resident commissioner, in the case of Puerto Rico) who represent the US territories. They do not have voting rights on legislation but have floor privileges and can participate in certain other House functions.
The six territories are:
- District of Columbia
- Puerto Rico
- American Samoa
- Guam
- the Northern Mariana Islands
- the US Virgin Islands.
The delegates are elected every two years, as with the rest of the House, except Puerto Rico, whose representatives are chosen every four years.
The US Senate
There are also 33 Senate seats up for grabs this year, roughly one-third of the 100-seat body, and one seat will be decided in a special election.
In the Senate, each state gets equal representation by having two seats each. It is not dependent on the size of its population the way the House of Representatives is.
In the current Senate, there are 49 Republicans, 47 Democrats and four independents, who caucus with the Democrats:
- Bernie Sanders from Vermont
- Angus King from Maine
- Joe Manchin from West Virginia
- Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona
The vice president is the president of the US Senate. The role includes presiding over Senate sessions and casting tiebreaker votes. Besides voting on legislation, the upper chamber must confirm presidential appointments of cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, other federal judges and ambassadors.
Eight of the Senate elections are considered to be tight races.
- Montana
- Wisconsin
- Ohio
- Nevada
- Pennsylvania
- Michigan
- Arizona
- Texas
Seven of those eight seats are currently occupied by Democrats. Only one race for a Republican-held seat is considered a toss-up.
Ultimately, whichever party controls Congress controls the ability to pass legislation. And that could buoy or doom any incoming president’s agenda.
Governor races
Voters in 11 states and two territories – Puerto Rico and American Samoa – will also elect governors:
- American Samoa
- Delaware
- Indiana
- Missouri
- Montana
- New Hampshire
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Puerto Rico
- Utah
- Vermont
- Washington
- West Virginia
What is the Electoral College?
In the US, the president and vice president are not directly elected by voters.
When voters make their choices for these offices on their ballot, they are really voting for a slate of electors to represent their state. After the votes are counted and certified, these electors are pledged to vote for a presidential and vice presidential candidate.
These electors cast the deciding votes for the president and vice president during a meeting of the Electoral College in December. This year, it will vote on December 17.
In 48 states, the presidential candidate who gets the most votes wins all that state’s electors, but in Maine and Nebraska, the winner-takes-all method does not apply.
These two states allocate their electors based on a more complicated system that reflects the popular vote on the state and congressional district levels. Hence, their Electoral College votes can be split.
The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of its House members plus two, the number of US senators from each state.
For example, California gets 54 Electoral College votes. That corresponds to its two senators and 52 House members.
There are a total of 538 electors: 535 from the 50 states and three from the District of Columbia, which is the federal capital and not a state.
Before the elections, the political parties in each state choose their slate of electors. The electors are almost always party officials or supporters.
Under this system, a candidate who wins the popular vote may not actually win the White House.
One recent example was in 2016 when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote to Republican Donald Trump. His victory was buoyed by wins in key swing states that polls had predicted would go in favour of Clinton: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
There can also be “faithless electors” like in 2016 when seven electors cast their ballots for the other candidate rather than the one that won the state’s vote.
Five of the electors were unfaithful to Clinton and two to Trump. One of the Democratic electors voted for Senator Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton.
A Supreme Court decision in 2020 rejected the idea that electors may exercise discretion in the candidate they back. The court sided with Washington and Colorado courts that imposed penalties on faithless electors.
What are battleground states?
Most states lean very clearly towards either Democrats or Republicans, making their electoral outcomes almost a given.
But every four years, several states offer close races between the two main presidential candidates. These are known as battleground states, swing states or toss-up states. Candidates disproportionately focus their campaigns on these states.
Election analysts consider states battlegrounds when opinion polls show the margin of victory in those states to be fewer than 5 percentage points.
The seven battleground states expected to determine the outcome of the 2024 elections are:
- Arizona – 11 electoral votes
- Georgia – 16 electoral votes
- Michigan – 15 electoral votes
- Nevada – six electoral votes
- North Carolina – 16 electoral votes
- Pennsylvania – 19 electoral votes
- Wisconsin – 10 electoral votes
Early voting has begun in 25 states. Of those, Utah, Vermont and Washington have only mail-in early voting.
By Monday, more than 42.9 million Americans had already cast their ballots either by in-person early voting or by mail.
According to an average of nationwide polls compiled by the FiveThirtyEight website, Harris is ahead by 1.4 percentage points as of Sunday.
In battleground states, the presidential contest is even closer according to the polls. Trump and Harris are essentially even in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan. North Carolina has Trump ahead by a point. The former president also leads in Georgia and Arizona — but the gap between Trump and Harris is within the margin of error for polls.
Here is what the electoral map looks like according to FiveThirtyEight as of Sunday:
How large is the voter turnout?
Voter turnout for US presidential elections has hovered around 60 percent in recent elections. In 2016, 60.1 percent of eligible voters turned out, which was up from 58.6 percent in 2012 but down from 61.6 percent in 2008.
The 2020 presidential election had the highest voter turnout in more than a century with 66.6 percent. In a tightly contested election, Joe Biden won the election with the most votes for any presidential candidate in US history with 81,283,501 votes, and Trump received 74,223,975 votes, the highest of any Republican candidate. In the race held during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 100 million people – two-thirds of total voters – voted early.
