November 5 is America’s election day. It is hard to predict who will win the presidential race: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Current polls suggest a very tight contest. Which way it finally turns will depend on a host of factors, some uniquely American, especially the electoral college. The US was famously called by Samuel Huntington “a Tudor Polity”, roughly meaning extreme decentralisation and no national uniformity.

States in the US not only have disproportionate power; they also have quite different electoral rules unlike India where the Election Commission conducts and certifies electoral results, that power in the US belongs to states. And such power, most of all, is embodied in the concept of an electoral college which is, comparatively speaking, an unusual institution. It has the capacity to undo popular will.

Let us begin with a larger national-level overview, which will allow us to unpack the intricacies of the Electoral College later. The US has a population of roughly 335 million, and there are approximately 245 million eligible voters. If the turnout is as high as 66-67 per cent, the level it touched in 2020 is among the highest in decades, and anywhere between 160-165 million votes will be cast. That will make it the third largest election exercise in 2024, exceeded only by India and Indonesia.

The four largest voting groups by ethnicity/race are Whites (67 per cent), Latinos/Hispanics (13 per cent), Blacks (12 per cent) and Asians (5 per cent). The political inclinations of the three minorities are easily described. In 2020, these groups voted 65-87 per cent in favour of the Democratic party, with Blacks going as high as 87 per cent. According to the most recent polls, vote for Democrats is down in all three categories, but it is not necessarily going hugely in favour of Trump.

The possible shift among Black men has come to be widely noted, especially after President Obama exhorted them to exercise wisdom and sense, not conventional gender prejudice. Compared to women, 7-8 per cent fewer men are saying they will vote for Harris.

According to James Carville, a long-time adviser to Democrats who shot to fame as lead strategist to Bill Clinton in 1992, the reason is that some Black men think the Democratic party has become too feminised. They are unwilling to accept a female president. But this problem may not be confined to Black males. The US has always had a male president. Is it ready to accept a woman as the nation’s highest leader and commander-in-chief? Some believe Hilary Clinton also suffered for this reason.

What can we say about the White vote? Its division appears to be both on racial and class lines, especially if education can be viewed as an indicator of class. The Pew Research Center reports that Republican voters are “overwhelmingly White”, accounting for 79 per cent of the total vote for the party. And “overall, about half of Republican voters (51 per cent) are White adults without a college degree, making them the single largest bloc within the party when looking at race, ethnicity and education together.”

Let us examine these numbers a bit differently. According to the US Census Bureau, only 38 per cent of the US population (age 25 and older) was college educated in 2021, and 42 per cent of the White population belonged to this category (as compared to 28 per cent of Black, 21 per cent of Hispanic, and 61 per cent of Asian communities). Nearly two thirds of whites who support Trump are non-college educated and only a third college college-educated.

In non-White communities, the education-based class polarisation is not so sharp. Trump is likely to get only 31-32 per cent of the non-White, non-college-educated vote, with nearly two-thirds of the non-White non-college vote going to Harris. In sum, most college-educated Whites would vote for Democrats and most non-college-educated Whites for Republicans, whereas for non-White communities, ethnicity and race would trump class.

But, after all is said and done, these country-level disaggregations are not going to be decisive. Harris appears to be ahead in the national vote, but it is the electoral college that will determine who wins — it is possible to win the national vote but lose the presidential election, which has happened five times in American history, twice recently — in 2000 and 2016. But how would such divergence come about?

The Electoral College has 538 votes: 435 for the House of Representatives, 100 for the Senate and three for Washington DC. The House is entirely population-based. In the Senate, every state has two seats regardless of its population size. This makes the Electoral College not entirely based on national popular will. Rather, the popular will gets a coating of small-state bias. Essentially, to win the presidency, a candidate must obtain 270 votes of the electoral college. Some states, such as California and New York, are reliably Democratic, while others, like Texas and Florida, are unquestionably Republican. As of now, Harris is sure of 226 votes, and Trump 219. To be president, the former needs 44 more electoral college votes, and the latter 51.

Where will these vote colleges come from? From the so-called battleground or swing states. Currently, there are seven such swing states: Pennsylvania (19 votes), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), Nevada (6). They are deadlocked. Because they can swing an election, these states take up a disproportionate energy of campaigns. Harris and Trump always seem to be campaigning there (over three decades in Massachusetts, nearly always Democratic, I have seen only one candidate campaign. Barack Obama came in 2012, and only once).

A conceptual category can be used to sum up the situation. This election will depend on what scholars call “intersectionality”. An unpredictable combination of gender/race/ class/state will determine who wins. But whichever way this mix ultimately settles, it will be, substantially though not wholly, in answer to two fundamental questions.

Is America ready for a Black woman president, or would White supremacy make a comeback via Trump? Will America continue to be engaged in the world, or will it descend into a world of Trumpian tariffs, immigration cuts and isolationism?

The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute. Views are personal.