On Tuesday 5 November, Americans will vote after one of the most surprising and chilling election campaigns in history. President Joe Biden dropped out of the race to be replaced by his vice-president, Kamala Harris, while the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, survived an assassination attempt and was embroiled in multiple criminal cases.
The outcome in the world’s largest economy will have far-reaching consequences – both inside the US and globally – on the climate crisis, abortion and development.
Here are the terms you need to know.
Ballot measures
It isn’t just a choice between the Democratic ticket (Kamala Harris and Tim Walz) and the Republican one (Donald Trump and JD Vance) that voters will be asked to make in November. US ballots can also include ballot measures: statewide laws, issues or questions.
This year voters in 10 US states could be asked to vote on abortion law or measures. They are Missouri, Florida, Nebraska, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Maryland, New York, South Dakota and Colorado.
Down-ballot voting
Measures on the ballot other than the vote for US presidential ticket are down-ballot measures, and a third or more of the roughly half of Americans who usually turn up to vote don’t fill out the entire ballot, according to the US Vote Foundation. Voters do not have to vote for any down-ballot measures for their ballots to count.
Electoral college
The electoral college is a group of 538 people, called electors, who officially cast their votes for the US president after citizens have voted. This is a requirement outlined in the US constitution. The electors are chosen by political parties in each of the US’s 50 states ahead of the election.
Different states have different numbers of electoral college votes, with the number decided based on the census. The number of votes is equal to its total congressional delegation: the number of senators plus the number of representatives. While not a state, the District of Columbia – as in Washington DC – is allocated three electoral college votes.
This is why the total is 538: 100 senators plus 435 representatives plus three for DC.
A candidate needs more than half – or at least 270 – of the electoral college votes to win. In most states, all of the electoral college votes from the state go to the same candidate. The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district.
The party that wins a state has its electors formally vote for its candidate. This happens a few weeks after the November election – and after US states have certified their election results – on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.
In 2020 Donald Trump tried to remove electors in some states before the electoral college vote but the US supreme court rejected that attempt the week before.
Popular vote
The popular vote is the overall number of qualified voters who voted for a given candidate: in other words, the number of ballots cast for one candidate or another. The main thing to know about the popular vote is that winning it does not mean you win the presidency. The presidency is won by the candidate who gains the majority of electoral college votes. In other words: the US election is decided by races in individual states. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but still won the presidency and in 2000, George W Bush received fewer votes than Al Gore but also won.
Canvassing and certification
Canvassing is the process of counting ballots and tabulating results. This includes checks to ensure the results are valid, including ensuring every ballot is accounted for, and repeatedly verifying the results.
Canvassing ends with certification, where the canvassing process is signed off on. In short, it is the official confirmation of the results.
County election officials certify the canvass by signing a declaration that results, reported by precincts, are a complete and accurate record of every vote cast.
Certification is mandatory and codified in law, meaning officials cannot refuse to certify a result, though some have refused to do so. Though the certification process has “long been regarded as an administrative afterthought”, according to the Associated Press, there are fears this could happen again in November.
Red state, blue state, swing state
A red state is a one that tends to vote Republican, a blue state one that tends to vote Democrat, and a swing state one that swings between the two major parties from one election to the next.
Swing states, or battleground states, are where campaigns tend to spend the most money trying to win over undecided voters, or voters who they hope might be convinced to switch from supporting the other team to theirs.
Voters in the seven swing states are likely to decide the election this year. The states, and the number of electoral college votes up for grabs, are Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Michigan (15), Nevada (6), North Carolina (16), Pennsylvania (19) and Wisconsin (10). Together they account for 93 electoral college votes, or more than a third of what a candidate needs to win.
Swing states are less commonly referred to as “toss-up” or “purple” states – the latter referring to a mix of blue and red.
Blue wall, red wall
The blue wall refers to 18 US states and the District of Columbia – home to Washington DC – that voted Democrat from 1992 to 2012.
In 2016 Trump won by clinching three blue wall states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The red wall is less commonly used as a phrase but once referred to the states running from South Carolina to Idaho. In 2020 Time magazine referred to it as “more like a pink curtain or pink pond” because it had started to break down.
Rust belt
The rust belt is a collection of states in the US north-east and midwest where industries such as manufacturing and coalmining have declined – or “been left to rust”. It is an economic region rather than a geographical one. Michigan, home to Detroit, once the centre of the US automotive industry, is one of these.
It is generally seen as encompassing a large part of the midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin) along with Pennsylvania, West Virginia and parts of New York, according to Encyclopeda Britannicato Encyclopedia Britannica.
There are three swing states in the midwestern rust belt – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which is why it is important in any election, including this one.
Winning these states is one of Kamala Harris’s paths to victory – or gaining enough electoral college votes – according to analysts who modelled the pathways based on polling. The other path to victory for Harris and the Democrats is the sun belt (more on what that refers to below). According to the model, Trump would need to capture both groups of states to earn the 270 electoral college votes necessary to secure victory.
The sun belt
The sun belt includes 15 states extending across the southern US, from south-west to south-east, which have a sunnier or milder climate than the northern states.
It includes the four swing states of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia. The remaining three swing states are in the rust belt.
Bible belt, flyover states
The Bible belt is the American south and tends to be Christian and conservative – and vote Republican. It includes the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Oklahoma. The city of Tulsa in the state of Oklahoma is known as the “buckle” of the Bible belt.
Flyover states, or flyover country, also known as middle America, are the states at the centre of the country, between the US east and west coasts – the country’s most populous areas. A third of Americans live in just four states: California, Texas, Florida and New York.
Absentee ballots or mail-in voting
These are votes cast by mail, or in person, depending on a state’s rules, before election day. Trump has called for an end to mail-in voting. This is partly because in the 2020 election, many Americans voted by mail because of the Covid pandemic, and more Democrats than Republicans chose this option. Seven million more Democrats than Republicans voted early in the 20 states that compile party data.
Provisional ballots
When a voter’s name does not appear on the voter registration list at the polling place at their precinct on election day, they may be given a provisional ballot, which allows them to vote but means their vote is placed in a separate “secrecy envelope” rather than the ballot box. The registration status of these voters is then determined. If they are registered, their vote is counted.
In 2018 a voter named Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election without realising she was ineligible to vote. The case was seen as part of a broader Republican effort to intimidate people from voting. Mason was acquitted in 2024.
Voter suppression
Voter suppression tactics are laws, measures or misinformation designed to prevent people – for example people of colour, more of whom tend to vote Democrat, according to research from Pew – from voting or registering to vote.
Voting advocates in the south told the Guardian in 2023 that they felt they were playing Whac-A-Mole, trying to educate and register voters while also having to work to defeat suppressive legislation that would impose new rules on mail-in voting or limit drop boxes or require proof of citizenship to vote.
The various tactics are too complicated to go into here. But Georgia is a telling example. In 2021 Georgia Republicans enacted SB 202, a bill with sweeping voting restrictions, including a ban on giving out food or water within 150ft (45.7m) of a polling place or within 25ft (7.6m) of any voter standing in a line – which could extend well beyond the 150ft radius. Violating it is a misdemeanour punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Georgia had seen long lines to vote and many saw the measure as an obvious attempt to make it harder for Black voters to cast a ballot. The law was darkly ridiculed in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Path to victory
The path to victory refers to how a candidate wins 270 electoral college votes – rather than, for example, the most votes overall – and therefore wins the election. It involves targeting certain states – swing states and their electoral college votes – with time, money and messaging. It often involves candidates’ chances in and focus on rust belt and sun belt states, which encompass the seven swing states and their all-important electoral college votes.
Surrogates
Campaign surrogates are individuals who speak publicly on behalf of a political candidate, typically to promote them. Think Oprah, Obama and Joe Biden for Harris, or Hulk Hogan and Nikki Haley for Trump.
October surprise
This is the term for a news event that happens just before the election, in other words October – because the election is always held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November – that influences the election’s outcome. For example the Access Hollywood tape, or the John Podesta emails in the 2016 election.
