The race to become the next president has never been more tense or intense. Record amounts of money are being raised and spent. The public is being bombarded by political ads and debates. The country is divided and polarised like never before. But what does all this mean for the outcome of the presidential race?
The authors of the US constitution set up a system to decide who becomes President. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its representation in Congress (plus three for Washington DC). Voters actually cast their ballots for a group of people called electors who are pledged to vote for a particular candidate. There are 538 electoral votes in total, and whoever gets a majority of those decides the president.
Most states have a winner-takes-all policy, so whichever candidate wins the popular vote in a state gets all its electoral votes. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which use a proportional method. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
Kamala Harris has a few key challenges to overcome in this election. First, many voters in swing states know very little about her. Second, she is facing a tough map of Senate races. And finally, she is running against a Republican who has proven to be very effective in national campaigns. Our North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of all this in his weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Sign up here.