How the US elects its president

You vote for a candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins.
It, however, does not work like that in the US. There the electoral college decides the winner.
Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia has electoral votes equal to the number of representatives it has in the Senate and the House of Representatives, which depends on the population of the state. Big states have more representatives -- California has 54 electoral votes.
With the exception of Nebraska and Maine, if a candidate wins a state, he or she gets all the electoral votes the state has. This makes it imperative for a candidate to win states rather than getting the most votes.
Nebraska and Maine split their electoral votes. They give one electoral vote each to the winner of each of the congressional districts in them and the rest to the state's popular vote winner.
With 538 electoral votes on offer, a candidate needs half of this plus one -- 270 -- to start choosing the curtains for the White House.
To mention a few examples, Hillary Clinton in 2016 beat Donald Trump by 2,868,686 votes, but it did not matter since she got only 227 electoral votes to Trump's 304.
Perhaps the "worst victim" of this system in living memory is former vice-president Al Gore.
Gore had beaten George W Bush by 5,43,895 votes in the 2000 election, but he had lost Florida by just 537 votes.
Bush winning Florida was all that mattered. It gave him 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266.
Traditionally, California, with 54 electoral votes, and New York, with 28, go for democrats (blue). Texas, with 40 electoral votes, along with some smaller states like Oklahoma, with seven; Alabama, with nine; and Kentucky, with eight, usually go republican (red).
What a candidate needs to do is sure up his or her base states and campaign in states that could go either way -- usually called battleground states or swing states.
For this election, the swing states are Nevada, with six electoral votes; Arizona, with 11; Georgia, with 16; North Carolina, also with 16; Pennsylvania, with 19; Michigan, with 15; and Wisconsin, with 10.
Harris and Trump are very likely to get, if there is no catastrophe, 226 and 219 electoral votes respectively from states that are almost certain to go their way.
Harris needs 44 more electoral votes and Trump 51 from the swing states that have 93 votes on offer.
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