Swing states, Electoral College votes, candidates up and down the ballot, and millions of potential voters: Here’s the US election, broken down by the numbers.
Two
Several independent candidates ran – and at least one, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., made many eyebrow-raising headlines.
But in the end, the presidential race comes down to a binary choice, with two candidates from the major parties — Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump — seeking to lead a polarized America.
five
November 5 – Election Day, traditionally held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Seven
Number of swing states – States that do not clearly favor 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, and are focusing their campaign efforts in an effort to ensure victory.
In an extremely tight election, just a handful of votes in any of these states could decide the outcome.
34 and 435
Voters won’t just decide who occupies the White House on Election Day – they’ll also cast the U.S. Congress.
Thirty-four seats in the Senate and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.
The tenure of members in the House is two years. Republicans currently have the majority and Harris’s Democrats will be hoping for a change.
In the Senate, 34 of the 100 seats are available for six-year terms. Republicans are hoping to overturn the narrow Democratic majority.
538
Welcome to the Electoral College, the indirect system of universal suffrage that controls presidential elections in the United States.
Each state has a different number of electors—calculated by adding the number of their elected representatives in the House, which varies by population, to the number of senators (two per state).
For example, rural Vermont has only three electoral votes. Meanwhile, vast California has 54.
There are a total of 538 electors in 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 ensure the 2020 election ran smoothly, according to the Pew Research Center.
There are three types of election workers in the United States.
Poll workers — recruited to do things like greet voters, help with languages, set up voting equipment and verify voter ID and registration — make up most of the role.
According to Pew, election officials are elected, hired or appointed to perform more specialized duties such as training poll workers.
Poll observers are typically appointed by political parties to observe the counting of ballots – an issue expected to be particularly controversial this year, due to Trump’s refusal to agree to unconditionally accept the results.
Several election workers have already spoken to AFP about the pressure and threats they are facing ahead of the November 5 vote.
244 million
The number of Americans eligible to vote in 2024, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
How many of them will actually cast their vote remains to be seen, of course. But Pew Research Center says the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election have the three highest turnouts of their kind seen in the United States in decades.
Pew says on its website, “Nearly two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population voted for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for any national election since 1900.”
According to the Census Bureau, this means about 155 million voters.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
