Voters in the U.S. will go to the polls on November 5 to elect their next president. The election was initially meant to be between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. However, President Biden ended his campaign in July and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris. The big question now is who will win? Kamala Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July. For example, a CNN poll in September found that 48% of potential voters supported Harris and 47% supported Trump. That margin, the CNN contented, suggests “no clear leader” in the race. A recent poll by polling analysis website 538, which is part of ABC News, put the odds at 48% for Harris and 46% for Trump. While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the U.S. as a whole, they are not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election. That is because the U.S. 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 U.S. but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there is just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These places, known as “battleground states,” are where the election will be won and lost. There are seven such states in 2024 - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. One survey showed Harris holding a narrow lead of 49% to 48% in a two-way matchup. And in terms of Electoral College votes, a New York Times poll projected Harris to win 270 votes to Trump’s 268. That, the publication conclude, is “the closest modern U.S. presidential election.”

In anticipation of a potential Conservative/Republican administration next year, conservative groups across the U.S. have banded together and launched a presidential transition project called Project 2025. One of the key outcomes of the initiative was the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a playbook for the next Conservative administration that was published in April 2023. This VIF Brief looks at the key elements of Project 2025, the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise in particular, and analyze how it could impact U.S.-India relations going forward.