NEW YORK: If the RealClear Polling's (RCP) aggregation of polls in the seven swing states translates into votes at the voting booth, it sees Republican Candidate Donald Trump heading to the White House with a majority in the electoral college.
RCP has Trump having a slender lead in all the seven swing states that sets him on the path to victory with 312 electoral college votes to Vice President Kamala Harris' 226.
The winner needs 270 votes for a majority in the 538-member electoral college.
However, all this comes with a big caveat: The polling data is within the margin of error and there is no certainty that it will hold on November 5.
Therefore, suspense clouds the verdict in the election only a week away.
More straightforward, FiveThirtyEight, an ABC- affiliated electoral and political statistics analysis website, has the two candidates tied in all the seven swing states.
Nationally, RCP’s aggregation has Trump up by only 0.1 per cent in the popular votes.
Trump won the 2016 election with 306 electoral college votes, although Democrat Hillary Clinton got 2.87 million more votes, but secured only 232 electoral votes.
Candidates pour vast resources into the swing states because they matter more than the national popular votes because the US presidential election is based on the electoral college where voters pick 538 electors distributed according to the population of the states. The electors, in turn, elect the president.
In all but two small states, whoever gets the majority of votes in the state claims all the state’s electoral college votes.
They get their enormous power in determining the winner because, unlike most states where one of the two parties has almost unshakeable domination, neither has a hold on these seven states which could go either way.
Without the swing states’ total of 104 electoral votes taken into account, Trump leads in the electoral college with 219 to 215, but well short of the 270 needed for a win, according to RCP.
As of Monday, RCP, the respected collater of polling data, had these aggregations in the swing states:
Arizona with 11 electoral college votes: Trump leads 1.5 per cent
Georgia with 16 electoral votes: Trump up by 2.3 per cent
Michigan with 15 electoral votes: Trump leads by 0.1
Nevada with 6 electoral votes: Trump leads by 0.7 per cent
North Carolina with 16 electoral votes: Trump ahead by 0.8 per cent
Wisconsin with 10 electoral votes: Trump leads by 0.3 per cent
Although RCP’s aggregation shows Trump with a 0.1 per cent lead in national polls, in six of them from last week that went into its calculation, Harris was ahead by 1 per cent in two, CBS and Rasmussen, and Trump by 3 per cent in Wall Street Journal’s, and both were tied in the rest clouding the overall picture.
An ABC poll released on Sunday, which did not figure in the RCP matrix, gave Harris a 2 per cent lead.