Voters in the United States of America will go to the polls on November 5 to choose the next president. The election was originally a 'rematch' of 2020, but everything changed in July when President Joe Biden left the race and made way for the Democratic vice president, Kamala Harris, writes the BBC.
The main question now is - will America have its first female president or will it offer a second term to Donald Trump?
Who is leading in the national polls?
Harris has held a narrow lead over Trump in national polling averages since entering the race in late July and continues to pull ahead.
Harris saw gains in the polls in the first weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points in late August.
The polls were relatively similar in September and early October, but have seen some changes in the past two weeks.
While polls show how popular a candidate is across the country, they are not the best way to predict the outcome of an election.
That's because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly proportional to its population size. A total of 538 electoral college votes are available, so a candidate must reach 270 to win.
There are 50 states in the US, but because most of them almost always vote for the same party, in reality there are only a handful where both candidates have a chance of winning.
Who is winning in the polls in undecided states?
Right now, the lead in such states is so slim that it's impossible to know who's really ahead by looking at polling averages.
Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not to predict the outcome of an election.
It's also important to say that these polls have a margin of error of about three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.
Since Harris settled on being the Democratic nominee, the undecided states have seen quite a bit of change.
In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the numbers have changed several times since early August, but Trump has a slim lead in all of them right now.
In the other three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - Harris had led since early August, sometimes by two or three points, but the polls have changed significantly and Trump now has a slim lead in Pennsylvania.
All three of these states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump swept them in the 2016 election. Biden won them back in 2020, and if Harris can do the same, then he'll be well on his way to winning. the elections.
In Pennsylvania, Biden was trailing by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he left. It is a key state as it has the largest number of electoral votes of the seven states. Winning Pennsylvania paves the way for him to take over the White House.