United states presidential election

Today I’m going to talk about the United States’ Presidential Election and how it

works.

Unlike Portugal, the Americans adopted a system called an electoral college, in

which each state gains weight, according to the size of its population.

The candidate who receives at least 270 votes from the electoral college from

the 538 delegates from all over the country wins. In practice, what citizens

elected on November 3 this year and in all presidential elections, are the

delegates they intended to represent to choose the President of the country.

 For example, the most populous state, California, has the largest number of

delegates at the electoral college, 55. After counting voters' votes, California's

55 votes are attributed to the presidential candidate who obtained the majority

in the state. To help, almost all states adopt a system called winner-take-all, in

which the candidate who gets the most delegates stays with everyone. In other

words, if someone wins 28 of California's delegates ... he takes 55.

Two parties are major rivals in American politics: the Democratic and the

Republican parties. Each party advances a candidate in the presidential

election. In general, there are states that are traditionally Republican, others

where Democrats almost always win. What changes the game are the few

states that do not maintain a history of fixed political tendency, the so-called

‘swing states’, which can perform a ‘flip’.

This year the presidential candidates were Joe Biden who represented

Democrats and Donald Trump who represented Republicans. And the final

result of the elections showed that Biden managed to raise 306 delegates from

the Electoral College thus winning the elections.

Here we have the map of the United States and which party won in each state.

In blue we have Democrats represented by Joe Biden and in red we have

Republicans represented by Donald Trump. Those who have stripes are the

swing states that in the last elections voted for one party and for these in

another.

In conclusion, we can say that the American elections are very different from

ours and I hope that you have learnt more about this topic.