Will it be Obama or McCain? Nothing is certain for now even as the poll surveys show John McCain is trailing behind Barack Obama. The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama has a solid lead against John McCain. Today he's up by more than 7 points in the Real Clear Politics poll averages.
But just as some surveys were starting to write their landslide stories today, the next few days would show McCain behind by just one point. That might as well be a tie if you factor in the margin of error or then McCain could actually be a little bit ahead.
The weird thing is, these polls came out at the same time with other major polls showing Obama with a double-digit lead.
So, how do the candidates actually fare?
The short answer: The devil is in the details. This could be the most exciting presidential race in the recent history of the US. For the first time, the world is seeing a real Afro-American (or black American) up to become the first black American President. That nomer giving Bill Clinton the title of "first black American President" was just a silly metaphor. With what the polls are telling us, Obama is apparently a sure winner. But what the surveys don't tell us is how Americans could probably set aside racism and prove to the world that America is the bastion of world democracy and equality when it declared "all men are created equal". White Americans are a clear majority over the blacks. If Obama wins, it is because more Whites supported him.
Polling, of course, is not an exact science. Not even close. It's really an informed estimation game that leans on some speculation about who is showing up on Election Day. Pollsters can't ensure that they talk to a perfectly proportional representation of the people who will vote. So they weigh the responses they get to match the demographics of who they think will actually show up and pull the lever.
Since there is a week until we know who's showing up to vote, what are we poll-obsessed folks to do in the meantime? Well, the answer, as any voter in good faith would say, is to be patient and wait for Election Day.
With the U.S. Presidential election fateful day fast approaching, November 4 this year to be exact, the candidates are certainly jittery and anxious until the race will be over.
And not until all the votes are counted, tabulated and tallied, shall the winner be proclaimed. But, unlike in the Philippines, what we thought was a simple process of vote counting and tallying is not as simple at all. The U.S. presidential election is not won by the total number of votes of the population but by the total number of states that voted for a particular candidate.
Let’s make it simpler. Let’s say in California, once the total number of votes for that state has been tallied, the candidate with the most number of votes will be declared as the candidate which is voted upon or supported by California. Same procedure applies to the other states – New York, Mississippi, etc. until all the states have their own voted candidate, which are all then tallied to get the candidate with the most number of state votes.
However, not all of these different states have the same number of voting population, so it would be unfair for a state with more than five million population to have the same weight with that of a state with only more than a million population.
A good example would be California with more than 36 million people, as compared to Kansas with only over 3 million population. Ergo, California should have a bigger impact in the outcome of the votes because it has a bigger population. The question then would be how we put weights on the states so their influence on the election would be in relation to their population.
This is determined then by getting the number of districts in every state, the bigger the population, the more districts a state has. And the more districts the state has, the bigger is its influence on the election.
A state’s influence on the election is called the ‘electors’ which is the number of district in a state plus the number of senator from that state, which is always 2. Examples: North Carolina has 15 electors (13 districts + 2 senators) and California has 55 (53 + 2).
So when a candidate wins in a state, he wins the corresponding number of electors. This is how the candidate’s votes add up. By winning the election in a big population state, a candidate gets a bigger number of electors, which quantifies as his votes.
Adding up all the total number of electors from the different states, there are a total of 538 electors. Therefore to win a national election, the Presidential candidate must garner the majority of these electors or at least a total of 270. So by winning in more states (especially in big-population ones), a candidate who gets 270 electors or more wins the election.
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