Washington, DC, NOV 5 /DNA/ – Polls have opened for the 2024 United States election, a national vote that will decide not only the next president of the country but also the makeup of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Tuesday caps a mad-dash stretch of campaigning that saw Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and her Republican challenger Donald Trump crisscrossing the country in hopes of shoring up voters.

For weeks, polls have shown a remarkably tight race, with no candidate having the edge going into Election Day.

Whatever the outcome of the vote, the result will define US politics and policy for the next four years. It will also be historic as voters will either elect the first female president in Harris or the first convicted felon in Trump.

In the final sprint of the race, both candidates have laid out vastly different visions for the country’s future. They have also staked out divergent positions on key issues like the economy, immigration, women’s rights and democracy.

Harris has pledged to “turn the page” on what she calls Trump’s divisive rhetoric. She has also positioned herself as a “new generation” leader who will boost the middle class, protect women’s rights and maintain the integrity of US institutions at home and abroad.

Nevertheless, she has faced regular protests over her support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon.

Trump, meanwhile, has promised a return to a US “golden age”. To do that, he has sketched a plan to lift economic regulations, project US strength abroad and crack down on migrants – a line of attack that regularly dips into racist tropes.

But while the candidates’ platforms have starkly contrasted in both substance and tone, they overlap on one lofty theme: that the outcome of this year’s vote is pivotal.

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Trump has dubbed the 2024 race “the most important” one the country has ever seen, while Harris says it is the “most consequential” of voters’ lifetimes.

Both candidates spent the final 24 hours ahead of Election Day busily campaigning in key states.

“With your vote tomorrow, we can fix every single problem our country faces and lead America – indeed, the world – to new heights of glory,” said Trump as he delivered his closing pitch at the final rally of his campaign in the early hours of the morning in Grand Rapids, in the swing state of Michigan.

Harris said “the momentum is on our side” as she signed off in Philadelphia.

“We must finish strong,” the Democrat candidate declared. “Make no mistake, we will win.”

Election Day is the culmination of weeks of early voting in some locations. Several states began early voting – whether by mail or in person – as far back as September.

Nearly 81 million voters already cast their ballot before Election Day, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

That is more than half of the 158.4 million (PDF) total votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – and a sign of record turnout this year for early voting in some parts of the country.

Election Day will ultimately reveal not just which candidate comes out on top, but the full extent of the changing demographics of the US electorate.

The first voting site technically opened right after Monday midnight Eastern time (05:00 GMT, Tuesday) in the tiny New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch. The next slate opened at 5am ET (10:00 GMT) in Vermont.

Other polling sites will open as morning breaks across the six time zones that cover the 50 US states.

Once the polls close in the evening, the results may take hours or days to be tabulated. States cannot begin reporting their vote counts until polls close.

Results will start to trickle in by about 6pm ET (23:00 GMT) when the first polls close in states like Indiana and Kentucky.

The last polls will close in the states farthest west, Alaska and Hawaii, around Tuesday midnight ET (05:00 GMT, Wednesday).

After that, the timing of the results will come down to individual states, as the US does not have a centralised election system. Each state is responsible for tallying its ballots. The tighter the margins, the longer that process may take.

INTERACTIVE – US election 2024 Path to the US 2024 president battleground states-1730614654

All eyes will be on seven key states that are likely to decide the outcome: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and North Carolina.

In the US, the presidential election is decided not by the popular vote but by a weighted system called the Electoral College.

Under the system, each state is worth a certain number of Electoral College votes, equal to the number of senators and representatives in Congress each state has.

For example, the swing state of North Carolina has 14 representatives in Congress based on its population size. Two senators represent every state, bringing the total number of Electoral College votes for North Carolina to 16.

The outcome of the presidential race in a given state determines which candidate receives that state’s Electoral College votes.

All but two states have a winner-takes-all system: if a candidate wins the state, even by a small margin, they get all its Electoral College votes.

There are 538 Electoral College votes in total, spread across the US. Whoever passes the threshold of 270 wins the race.

Since certain states consistently lean Republican or Democrat, Harris is likely to win 226 Electoral College votes easily, and Trump is expected to carry 219 without issue. Beyond that, Harris has 20 paths to victory and Trump 21.

Al Jazeera will rely on The Associated Press news agency to determine who has won each state and, eventually, the overall election. The AP does not issue projections. It declares the result of a race only once a winner emerges and no other outcome is possible.

History-making race
This year’s vote will conclude an election season that repeatedly saw historic upheavals.

Donald Trump, 78, has become the central figure in the Republican Party and has led a movement that has sown doubt in the US election process.

Trump first entered the White House in 2016 after a surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. But he fell short in his re-election bid in 2020, when Joe Biden bested him at the ballot box.

The Republican leader, however, never conceded defeat and instead claimed that widespread voter fraud cost him the race, an unsubstantiated assertion.

Critics say since his 2020 defeat, Trump has never really stopped campaigning, laying the groundwork for his present-day bid. He officially announced he would seek re-election in 2022 at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

But his campaign has, at times, been overshadowed by historic court cases. Trump is the first president, past or present, to face criminal charges.

Four separate indictments have been issued against him: one for withholding classified documents, one for falsifying business records and two for efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

In the business records case in New York, Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts. But rather than dampen his re-election prospects, his legal troubles have largely energised his base, according to polls.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him and has called the indictments evidence of a coordinated “witch-hunt” designed to derail his presidential bid.

But he was not the only candidate facing historic hurdles as he raced for the White House.

His Democratic rival Harris was not even a candidate until about three months ago. Initially, in April 2023, President Biden announced plans to run for re-election.

He cruised through the Democratic primary season, running largely unopposed in the state-level contests. But concerns about the 81-year-old’s age and ability began to mount as he hit the campaign trail.

A special counsel report released in February, for instance, said Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” – something the president later denied. And Biden made several high-profile gaffes, calling Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the “president of Mexico”.

The concerns over Biden crescendoed after a stumbling debate performance in June, where the president seemed to trail off mid-thought.

By July, Biden had abruptly dropped out of the race, and Democrats quickly coalesced around his vice president, Harris.

By early August, enough Democratic delegates had sided with Harris in a virtual vote for her to be named the party’s nominee for the presidency.

But it was an unorthodox process: never before had an incumbent president dropped out so late in a race, and never in recent history had a major party nominee bypassed the traditional primary process.

The election may still break new ground. In the charged political climate, fears of physical threats to polling sites have surged like never before.

And after four years of Trump claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen, observers have warned he and his allies could challenge the 2024 race if the results do not go his way.

That means the cloud of uncertainty that has hung over US politics for months may not dissipate anytime soon.

WASHINGTON, NOV 5: Voters in the US go to the polls on Tuesday to elect their next president. The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?
Follow live election updates
All you need to know about election night
When will we know who has won?

Who is leading national polls?
Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.
The polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate.

While national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the whole country, they’re not the best way to predict the election result.
That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.
There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.
What is the electoral college?
Path to 270: The states Harris and Trump need to win
Who is winning in swing state polls?
Right now the leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.
Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it’s important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.
It’s also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.
In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.
In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but the polls have tightened significantly.
All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states.
In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

How are these averages created?
The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.
As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).
You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

Can we trust the polls?
The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts – so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election.
The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters – who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton – had been over-represented in polling samples.
In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.
Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.
But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

          Beijing, Nov 5 (AFP/APP):Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto will visit China this week, Beijing’s foreign ministry said Tuesday, on his first foreign tour as he seeks a more prominent position for Jakarta on the world stage.

                  The 73-year-old ex-general’s state visit will take place from Friday to Sunday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said in a statement.

                  Prabowo was sworn in on October 20, pledging to stick to Jakarta’s traditionally non-aligned foreign policy while making the world’s fourth-most populous nation more active abroad.

                  Beijing and Jakarta are key economic allies, but the world’s largest archipelago nation is trying to stop foreign vessels from fishing in its waters, saying it costs the economy billions of dollars annually.

                  Last month, Indonesia drove a Chinese coast guard ship from contested waters in the South China Sea three times.

                  Chinese vessels have occasionally entered Indonesia-claimed areas of the North Natuna Sea at the southern edge of the South China Sea, drawing protests from Jakarta.

                  The incidents are an early test for newly inaugurated President Prabowo Subianto, who has pledged to bolster the defense of Indonesian territory.

                  In 2020, Indonesia deployed fighter jets and warships to patrol the Natuna islands’ waters in a spat with Beijing after Chinese vessels entered the area.

                  Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment on his upcoming visit to China.

                  On his first planned foreign visits since taking power, Prabowo will also travel to Peru and Brazil for APEC and G20 summits, the foreign ministry has said.

                  Zeitung Kompas reported last month, citing presidential palace sources, that he is also expected to visit the United States and Britain.

                  After his February election win, Prabowo used his eight-month transition period to visit more than a dozen countries — including China — to showcase a more active foreign policy than his predecessor Joko Widodo, who focused more on domestic issues like the economy.

                  Indonesia has long maintained a neutral foreign policy. It refuses to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or US-China rivalry, but Prabowo has called for stronger ties with Moscow despite Western pressure on Jakarta.

                  Indonesia and Russia kicked off their first joint naval drills on Monday.