The highly anticipated 2024 United States presidential election is set to take place on November 5th. On the same day, there will also be partial elections for both the House of Representatives and the Senate, with the elected officials set to take office on January 20, 2025. In the U.S. presidential election system, it is not necessarily the candidate who receives the most popular votes that wins, but rather the one who secures a majority of the electoral votes.
How does the Electoral College system work? Do all states operate on a winner-takes-all basis? Which states are considered swing states this year? Will the counting of votes take a long time? Central News Agency has compiled relevant information.
After Democratic President Biden announced in June that he would not seek reelection following a disastrous debate performance, the Democratic Party put forward Vice President Kamala Harris as their candidate, with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. The Republican Party, led by former President Donald J. Trump, who dominated the party’s primaries, has Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.
In addition to the major party candidates, there are also three independent presidential candidates: Cornel West, a philosophy professor at Union Theological Seminary, Jill Stein, a physician who ran for president as the Green Party nominee in 2012 and 2016, and Chase Oliver, a left-leaning liberal political activist.
According to polling trends on the RealClearPolitics website, after Biden announced he would not seek reelection on July 21, Trump, who had been trailing in the polls, began to decline. Following a golden crossover on August 5, Kamala Harris’s polling numbers continued to rise, surpassing 49% on September 15. As of October 13, Harris led Trump in the comprehensive polls with 48.9% to 47.2%.
Contrary to a direct popular vote system in most presidential democracies, the U.S. presidential election follows the Electoral College system, where each state selects its own set of electors who then cast their votes on behalf of the state. The number of electors in each state is proportional to its population size, with a total of 538 electoral votes nationwide, with California possessing the most at 54, and even the least populous states having at least 3. The candidate who obtains over half of the electoral votes, 270 or more, wins the presidential election.
Forty-eight states in the U.S. follow a winner-takes-all system, where the candidate with the most popular votes in a state wins all of that state’s electoral votes, except for Nebraska and Maine which have slightly different systems.
Nebraska has 5 electoral votes, with the winning candidate in the statewide popular vote receiving 2 of those electoral votes, while the candidates who win the highest votes in each of the state’s 3 congressional districts win the remaining 3 electoral votes. Maine has a similar system with 4 electoral votes and 2 congressional districts.
Swing states, also known as battleground states, are crucial in fiercely contested elections as they hold the balance of power. Therefore, major candidates often invest time and resources into swing states to secure victory.
According to the RealClearPolitics analysis, the swing states for this year are Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, totaling 7 states.
While the focus is primarily on the outcome between Trump and Harris, it is important to note that congressional legislators with significance for lawmaking will also be elected on the same day.
The term of office for members of the U.S. House of Representatives is 2 years, meaning all 435 seats in the House will be up for reelection in tandem with the presidential election.
As for the members of the U.S. Senate, they serve 6-year terms, with about one-third of the 100 seats up for election every 2 years. This year, 34 Senate seats are up for reelection, with 33 being contested in the general election and 1 being a special election.
The House of Representatives, primarily responsible for government spending, is currently controlled by the Republican Party, while the Senate, crucial for approving key government appointments, is in the hands of the Democratic Party.
In addition, governors in 11 states and two U.S. territories (American Samoa and Puerto Rico) will also be elected on November 5th.
Typically, the winner will declare victory on election night, with the mainstream media, including television networks such as NBC, CBS, ABC, and cable news channels CNN and Fox News, determining the winners based on exit polls and preliminary vote counts. If the margin of victory is clear, the losing candidate will congratulate the winner and publicly concede defeat, followed by the winning candidate giving a speech and accepting the cheers of supporters.
However, in 2020, Biden and Trump’s election results were so close that it took several days to determine the outcome.
Trump, who has claimed the “2020 election results were stolen,” has not committed to accepting the results of the 2024 election, but during the debates, he stated that he would accept the election outcome if it were a “fair, legal, and clean election.” Additionally, in an interview that aired on September 22, Trump revealed that if he fails in the November election, he will not run for presidency in 2028.