A Salford university history lecturer and expert on American politics American expert says whichever candidate wins it will be a significant election for America.
Dr. Krysten Blackstone is a social and military historian of Early America at the University of Salford and says the election is of historic importance to the USA.
”I think a Donald Trump presidency is something we have seen before and is something that a lot of people are quite wary about happening again,” she said.
“Then there is also the obvious Kamala Harris would be the first woman of colour to be president”.
“If she won, she would be the first female president of the United States and that is incredibly significant.
She added that the world is currently facing several ‘pressure points’.
“There is the war in the Ukraine. There are current conflict in Israel and Palestine. The US is so important, it has quite a significant impact on all of those things. And so who becomes president is going to dictate or at least have a large say in foreign affairs and world affairs for the next four years, at least”.
This election comes a few months after UK’s political landscape made one of its biggest changes in its history with the return of the Labour party in power and the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Polling conducted by YouGov last month shows that 64% of British adults favour the incumbent vice president, while just 18% want to see the return of Donald Trump.
And the same poll shows that 76% of British voters think who wins the US election matters “a lot” or “a fair amount”, while just 17% think it doesn’t matter much or at all.
Trump could follow through on his promise to impose 10%-20% tariffs on all imports to the US in a bid to encourage consumers to buy American. A blanket 10%-20% on imports would also badly hurt the UK – the US is Britain’s largest export market, reaching a value of £188.2bn in the year to October.
The Labour Party and the Democrats are sister parties they are ideologically aligned on many topics and often help each other around elections.
Some Labour officials had been in the US having informal conversations about how they won such a resounding victory in July.
Dr. Blackstone briefly explains how the new President is decided.
“The US election is not based just on the popular vote. It does not matter who gets the most votes across the country. It matters who gets the most electoral votes. Each state has a number of electoral votes, and that number is comprised of the amount of people they have in Congress. You take the number of senators a state has, and the number of representatives in the house, which is population based”.
“You can find those numbers and that gives a total number of electoral votes. And for most states whoever gets the most vote in that state gets those electoral votes. The candidates must get 270 electoral votes to win the election”.
But for now, it is not still neck and neck in a lot of states as to who could be the next President.