USA – The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris. The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term? As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages, since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August. But the numbers have been relatively stable since early September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on 10 September, which was watched by nearly 70 million people.

You can see how little the race has changed nationally in the last few weeks in the poll tracker, with the trend lines showing the averages and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate. While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states. (BBC)…[+]