Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.
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.
Who is leading national polls?
Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.
The two candidates went head to head in a televised debate in Pennsylvania on 10 September that just over 67 million people tuned in to watch.
A majority of national polls carried out in the week after suggested Harris's performance had helped her make some small gains, with her lead increasing from 2.5 percentage points on the day of the debate to 3.3 points just over a week later.
That marginal boost was mostly down to Trump’s numbers though. His average had been rising ahead of the debate, but it fell by half a percentage point in the week afterwards.
You can see those small changes in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing how the averages have changed 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.
Who is winning in swing state polls?
Right now, the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election with just one or two percentage points separating the candidates.
That includes Pennsylvania, which is key as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven states and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.
In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in these seven states.
One thing to note is that there are fewer state polls than national polls being carried out at the moment so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.
But looking at the trends since Harris joined the race does help highlight the states in which she seems to be in a stronger position, according to the polling averages.
In the chart below you can see that Harris has been leading in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin since the start of August - but the margins are still small.
All three had all been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same this year then she will be on course to win the election.
How are these averages created?
The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.
As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).
You can read more about the 538 methodology here.
Can we trust the polls?
At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in swing states - and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.
Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.
Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.
Source: BBC News
Donald Trump Is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has both derided Time magazine and pined for its approval, was named the publication’s person of the year on Thursday.
Mr. Trump also received the title in 2016, after his first presidential election victory, and now joins a group of 16 people who have been chosen more than once. The club includes the last three two-term presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only person to have been given the title three times.)
Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor in chief, wrote in the magazine that the choice was not a difficult one: “On the cusp of his second presidency, all of us — from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics — are living in the Age of Trump.”
Mr. Trump, who rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, has had a tempestuous relationship with Time. After being named person of the year in 2016, he described the magazine as a “very important” publication and said it had granted him a “tremendous honor.”
But Mr. Trump, who had won a polarizing presidential race in which he lost the popular vote, bristled at Time’s cover, which described him as “president of the divided states of America.”
“I didn’t divide,” he objected in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show, adding: “We’re going to put it back together. And we’re going to have a country that’s very well healed.”
In 2017, Mr. Trump said he would most likely have been named person of the year for a second straight year if not for his unwillingness to sit for an interview and a photo shoot. Time pushed back on that claim.
But his frustration with the magazine has deeper roots. In 2011 he claimed that it had “lost all credibility” after it left him off a list of influential people. And as he grumbled in 2013 about another snub, he predicted that Time would soon cease to exist.
Still, Mr. Trump has plainly coveted the platform offered by the magazine and has said he grew up reading it. At one point, a fake 2009 cover story featuring Mr. Trump hung at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., The Washington Post reported in 2017.
Time has cast its annual choice as a reflection of a figure’s significance, not as a statement of approval.
Walter Isaacson, then the editor of Time, wrote in 1998 that the person of the year title recognized the individual “who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”
The tradition — dismissed by some as a gimmicky self-promotion — dates to 1927, when Time selected Charles A. Lindbergh, who made the first nonstop solo trans-Atlantic airplane flight, as man of the year. (Time changed the name from man of the year to person of the year in 1999.)
The title has been bestowed on complex and even loathed figures in history, including Hitler and Stalin.
The title was shared by President Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, after their victory in the 2020 presidential race. Last year, Time selected the pop superstar Taylor Swift, who appeared on the magazine’s cover with one of her cats wrapped around her shoulders.
This year, Mr. Jacobs, the Time editor, wrote that Mr. Trump was “once again at the center of the world, and in as strong a position as he has ever been.”
And this year, the magazine’s cover — which showed Mr. Trump frowning slightly, his arm resting on his knee — did not describe him as “president of the divided states of America.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/politics/trump-time-person-year.html