By IRNA,
New York : The winner of the US presidential election is not always the candidate who wins the popular vote – the path to victory is to win a majority in the electoral college.
Each state has a certain number of electors who elect the president – the number depends on the state’s population – and the trick is to win enough states to stack up 270 electors’ votes.
The Congressional Quarterly has tracked both presidential and congressional races for many years.
Its current calculations suggest that Barack Obama is ahead in two major swing states, Ohio and Virginia.
Its list of toss-up states includes not only Florida and North Carolina, but also Montana, Missouri and Indiana, which were considered solidly Republican until very recently.
Pollster.com is a site that takes polls from other sites and uses them to estimate state-by-state results.
As of noon on Saturday 1 November, Pollster had not followed Real Clear Politics in moving Arizona into the toss-up category, or Pennsylvania into the leaning Obama group.
It also sees New Mexico as solid for Obama, whereas Real Clear Politics classifies it as leaning towards Obama.
Pollster is the only one of the five websites which sees support for the Republican candidate weakening in South Dakota.
The website of Professor Larry Sabato, a well-known election expert from the University of Virginia, is now (since 30 October) predicting a landslide – more than 350 electoral college votes – for Barack Obama.
Professor Sabato no longer lists any states as toss-ups.
He has also stopped referring to states as “leaning” to one candidate or the other. Instead he says the race in certain states is “close”.
Perhaps because of this change of terminology, Professor Sabato is the only one of our five experts who – instead of listing Florida and Missouri as toss-ups – sees them as tending towards Barack Obama.