For centuries, presidents, kings, queens, dictators, and prime ministers have altered the way the world works. Just recently, the presidential election season in the US has been ramping up, leaving a lot of Americans wondering, what can be expected for the coming election season, and what candidate should we all be looking after?
The current President, Joe Biden, is running for re-election from the Democratic Party, automatically handing him the Democratic nomination. Now, the American people need to decide the Republican nominee, his main opponent. From the wings, enter the Republican primary. The Republican primary is where the top Republican candidates vie to win the vote of the Republican nomination. Trump, having started his campaign after his loss to Biden in 2020, began with a massive lead in the polls. According to ABC News, at the beginning of the primaries Trump was in the lead for the Republican nomination with 55% of the vote, with the next closest candidate being Ron Desantis, at 20%. For several months, candidates like Ron Desantis, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy debated each other for the chance to take the nomination from Trump. Despite Trump’s absence from the debates, his polls continued to stay the same.
Republican primary voting started on January 15 of this year in Iowa, where the caucus set the tone for how the rest of the primaries would go. Trump won Iowa with over 50% of the votes. State after state, Trump continued to gain ground on his competition, pulling ahead of his main rival in the republican party, Nikki Haley, and winning the Republican nomination. This fully confirmed the notion that the 2024 election would be a 2020 repeat, Biden vs. Trump.
With this confirmation, polls between these two candidates have been coming out of every news source, and despite all of his recent legal troubles, ABC News and the New York Times released polls that show Trump beating Biden by a few percentage points.
So what can voters look for in the future of this election process? They can start with the basics. Election Day, the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November, this year November 5, 2024, followed by electoral voting day is the day the world finds out who the United States’ next president will be. Leading up to the election, debates, campaigns, and voting booths will consume America’s news outlets and a lot of its citizens.
Most importantly, though, how is the president actually decided? The system that decides this, the Electoral College, was established by the Founding Fathers in 1787 Essentially, each state is allotted a certain number of electoral votes roughly proportional to population, and whichever candidate the majority of their citizenry prefers is where the electors will send all of their electoral votes. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, with a majority of 270 electoral votes required to elect the president. However, most states have already confirmed to one side of the political spectrum, so swing states, which are states that have been known to elect candidates from both parties, pretty much decide the fate of the elections. Presidents will rally in all 50 states, but mostly in swing states, to win their 270 votes.
Ultimately, the United States election process stands out as a system that fights to make all votes matter to some extent. The President of the United States of America is arguably the most important and powerful position in the world. Leading all the way up to November 5th of this year, the only thing anyone can advise to the American people is to do their research, weigh their options, and of course, vote carefully.
