‘Swing states’ hold key to US poll outcome
WASHINGTON: A handful of states will decide who becomes the 45th president of the US when voters go to the polls on November 8 to elect the successor to Barack Obama.
The two presidential frontrunners already know some of the states they can count on for support, while electorates elsewhere appear to be split down the middle.
These states are referred to as “swing states” or “battleground states”. They are the focus of election campaigns, with candidates spending disproportionate amounts of time and money to count voters there.
In recent polls, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Republican Donald Trump in most of battlegrounds. But the billionaire businessman hopes to reverse this trend.
A president in the US is elected in two steps. First, voters in 50 states cast ballots for one president and vice-president. But they actually pick a group of people referred to as “electors”. They will have the final say at a vote in December.
The number of electors in each state is based on its representation in Congress and equals the number of congressional districts. For instance, California picks 55 electors, while DC can only offer three. The total number of electors is 538, but 270 of them are needed to decide the outcome.
A candidate needs a majority of votes, however narrow, to claim the entire state. It is a winner-takes-all system called the electoral college, in which a presidential candidate with most votes wins all electors.
Democrats will traditionally expect to win all of California’s 55 electors. Republicans will count on the state of Texas and its 38 electors. Thus, neither state has received much attention from the two key candidates.
In this election, the prime battleground states are Florida (29 electors), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), and North Carolina (15). The second tier includes Arizona (11), Nevada (6) and Iowa (6). The recent polls suggest that Clinton leads in all of the swing states but Arizona, while the race in Ohio is very tight. This would translate into 300 electors and an easy win for the Democrats.
The Clinton campaign is also banking on some of the nation’s most populous Democratic-leaning states – California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Virginia. – Sputnik