From swing states to voters: The big numbers of the US election

The countdown has begun. It’s nine days to the US presidential election, one of the most significant in the country’s history.

Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is up against former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump. Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate while Trump’s choice is JD Vance, who has served as the United States senator from Ohio since 2023.

November 5 is the big election day but some states indulge in early voting. Over 41 million votes have been cast so far, reported Time, quoting data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab, which officially tracks early votes. Meanwhile, more than 2.7 million voters have cast early votes in the key state of Georgia.

The election can be a mumbo-jumbo of numbers. Here are some important ones you should pay attention to.

Two

The presidential race usually consists of two candidates from the major parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. This time the race is between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump who are seeking votes.

But these are not the only candidates. Many independents have also run for the position this time and acquired staggering votes.

Five

November 5. Election Day in the US is traditionally held on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November.

Seven 

There are seven swing states, precisely those that do not clearly favour one party over the other, meaning they are up for grabs.

Harris and Trump are courting voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, concentrating their campaign efforts there to ensure victory. In a razor-tight election, just a handful of votes in any of those states could decide the outcome.

34 and 435

Voters won’t just decide the White House occupant on Election Day but will also hit refresh on the US Congress. Thirty-four Senate seats and all 435 spots in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.

In the House, members serve a two-year term. Republicans currently have the majority and Harris’s Democrats will be hoping for a turnaround.

In the Senate, 34 seats out of 100 are available, for a six-year term. Republicans are hoping to overturn the narrow Democratic majority.

538

Welcome to the Electoral College, the indirect system of universal suffrage that governs presidential elections in the United States. Each state has a different number of electors that is calculated by adding the number of their elected representatives in the House, which varies according to population, to the number of senators (two per state).

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Rural Vermont, for example, has just three electoral votes. Giant California, meanwhile, has 54. There are 538 electors in total scattered across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. To take the White House, a candidate must win 270 votes.

774,000

The number of poll workers who volunteered to make sure the 2020 election ran smoothly, according to the Pew Research Center. There are three types of election staff in the United States. The majority are poll workers, recruited to do things like greet voters, help with languages, set up voting equipment and verify voter IDs and registrations.

Election officials are elected, hired or appointed to carry out more specialised duties such as training poll workers, according to Pew. Poll watchers are usually appointed by political parties to observe the ballot count – expected to be particularly contentious this year, thanks to Trump’s refusal to agree to unconditionally accept the result.

Many election workers have already spoken to AFP about the pressure and threats they are receiving ahead of the November 5 vote.

270 million and 78 million

Harris’s team spent $270 million on her campaign in September, while Trump’s spent much less, only $78 million, official filing shows. According to The New York Times, Harris’s campaign set a record for the biggest fund-raising quarter ever this fall, raising $1 billion since she entered the race following Joe Biden’s withdrawal in July.

244 million

The number of Americans who will be eligible to vote in 2024, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. How many of those will actually cast their ballot remains to be seen, of course. But the Pew Research Center says that the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022 and the presidential vote of 2020, produced three of the highest turnouts of their kind seen in the United States in decades.

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“About two-thirds (66 per cent) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for any national election since 1900,” Pew says on its website. That translated to nearly 155 million voters, according to the Census Bureau.

41 million

As of October 27, more than 41 million Americans had voted early, according to a University of Florida database. Most US states permit in-person voting or mail-in voting to allow people to deal with scheduling conflicts or an inability to cast their ballots on election day itself on November 5.

With inputs from AFP

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