If the RealClear Polling's (RCP) aggregation of polls in the seven swing states reflects the vote in the voting booths, then it is poised to send Republican Candidate Donald Trump to the White House with a majority in the electoral college.
RCP has Trump having a lean 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 direct, FiveThirtyEight, an ABC-affiliated electoral and political statistics analysis website, has the two candidates levelled in all the seven swing states.
Nationwide, RCP's aggregation shows that Trump leads by just 0.1 percent in the popular votes.
Trump won the 2016 election with 306 electoral college votes, while Democrat Hillary Clinton received 2.87 million more votes but garnered only 232 electoral votes.
Candidates spend enormous sums on the swing states because they have more significance than the popular votes at the national level since the US presidential election is determined by the electoral college where voters elect 538 electors distributed according to the population of the states. The electors elect the president.
In all states except two small ones, whoever wins the majority in the state takes all of 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 that could go either way.
Without the total of 104 electoral votes from the swing states, Trump leads in the electoral college with 219 to 215, but still falls 55 electoral votes short of the 270 needed for a win, according to RCP.
Up until Monday, RCP-the respected aggregator of polling data-had these tallies in the swing states:
Arizona with 11 electoral college votes: Trump by 1.5%
- Georgia : This margin lies at 2.3% for Trump
- Michigan : The margin here up to 0.1 for Trump.
- 6 Nevada, Trump, and with a leading margin up of 0.7%.
- 16, North Carolina, 0.8%; that shows the margin narrow and was Trump ahead of.
- Wisconsin with 10 is at a 0.3 margin; this the margin is increased from up to Trump.
Although RCP's aggregation shows Trump leading by 0.1 per cent in national polls, in six of them from last week that have gone into its calculation Harris is ahead by 1 per cent in two – CBS and Rasmussen – and Trump by 3 per cent in Wall Street Journal's, and the rest are both tied, smudging the picture.
An ABC poll released on Sunday, which did not figure in the RCP matrix, gave Harris a 2 per cent lead.
Read also| Erosion of Support Among Indian-Americans, Alarm for Democrats
Read also| Hamas and Hezbollah No Longer ‘Effective’ Proxies for Iran, Israeli Defense Minister
