The 58th United States Presidential Election will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. On this day, Americans cast their ballots for the man or woman who will serve as U.S. president for the following four years. The US presidential candidates are selected by the respective party delegates who had earlier voted at the national conventions of the two contesting parties- the Democratic and Republican- to determine which candidates appear on the ballots.

2020 Elections
Apart from winning Presidential position, control of the US Congress, state legislatures and governorships are also in play. But the big question is whether the incumbent president, Donald Trump, can win re-election. All eyes are on former vice president Joe Biden, the Democrat Party's Presidential candidate, who is contesting against Trump for the White House.
In 2016, Trump pulled off a mammoth political upset against Hillary Clinton, taking swing states such as Florida and North Carolina while overcoming the Democrats’ supposed “blue wall” in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But this time the candidates are different, the issues are different and the electorate has changed. Can Trump do it again?
The general election is not just about the presidency, however.
Democrats have a chance to take control of the US Senate from Republicans, with 34 out of 100 seats up for election and about a third of those looking competitive. Democrats also will try to defend their majority in the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats come up for re-election every two years. States will host legislative elections and 11 of them will hold elections for governors.

Who Can Vote?
There are more than 224 million people of voting age in the US. The 2020 electorate will be more diverse and younger than ever before, according to a January 2019 analysis from the Pew Research Center. Non-white voters will account for a third of eligible voters – their largest share ever – and one in 10 eligible voters will be of Generation Z (between ages 18 and 23).
In 2016, about 30% of Americans who were eligible to vote decided not to or were blocked, but given the surge in turnout for the 2018 midterm elections, 2020 could see an expanded electorate. However, experts say voter suppression and gerrymandering may have hindered Democrats in 2018 and may continue to counter the effects of a more enthusiastic voting base

Popular Votes
In a United States presidential election, the popular vote is the total number or percentage of votes cast for a candidate by voters in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.; the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide is said to have won the popular vote. However, the popular vote is not used to determine who is elected as the nation's president or vice president. Thus it is possible for the winner of the popular vote to end up losing the election, an outcome that has occurred on five occasions, most recently in the 2016 election. This is because presidential elections are indirect elections; the votes cast on Election Day are not cast directly for a candidate, but for members of the Electoral College. The Electoral College's electors then formally elect the president and vice president. The Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides the procedure by which the president and vice president are elected.
In short, the "national popular vote" is the sum of all the votes cast in the general election, nationwide. The presidential elections of 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 produced an Electoral College winner who did not receive the most votes in the general election.

Swing States
In American politics, the term swing state (or battleground state) refers to any state that could reasonably be won by either the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate by a swing in votes.
These states are usually targeted by both major-party campaigns, especially in competitive elections. Meanwhile, the states that regularly lean to a single party are known as safe states, as it is generally assumed that one candidate has a base of support from which they can draw a sufficient share of the electorate without significant investment by their campaign.
Due to the winner-take-all style of the Electoral College, candidates often campaign only in competitive states, which is why a select group of states frequently receives a majority of the advertisements and partisan media. The battlegrounds may change in certain election cycles and may be reflected in overall polling, demographics, and the ideological appeal of the nominees. Election analytics website FiveThirtyEight in 2016 identified the states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin as "perennial" swing states that have regularly seen close contests over the last few presidential campaigns.
In 2020 FiveThirtyEight updated this analysis noting that the electoral map is "undergoing a series of changes," with some states (e.g. Iowa, Michigan, Maine) swinging sharply rightward, and other "Red" states moving leftward by at least 4 points (e.g. Arizona, Georgia, Texas). Likewise, analysis of results of the 2018 midterms indicated that the "battleground states" are changing with Colorado (increasingly Democratic) and Ohio (increasingly Republican) becoming less competitive, and Georgia and Arizona moving into swing state territory.

Electoral College

The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The Founding Fathers established it in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.

The process:
The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress.

Number of Electors/ Electoral Votes:
The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Your State has the same number of electors as it does Members in its Congressional delegation: one for each Member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators. 
The District of Columbia is allocated 3 electors and treated like a State for purposes of the Electoral College under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution. For this reason, in the following discussion, the word “State” also refers to the District of Columbia and “Governor” to the Mayor of the District of Columbia.

Selection Of Electors:
Each candidate running for President in your State has his or her own group of electors (known as a slate). The slates are generally chosen by the candidate’s political party in your State, but State laws vary on how the electors are selected and what their responsibilities are.

General Election:
The general election is held every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. When you vote for a Presidential candidate, you are actually voting for your candidate's preferred electors. 
Most States have a “winner-take-all” system that awards all electors to the Presidential candidate who wins the State's popular vote. However, Maine and Nebraska each have a variation of “proportional representation.” 

What Happens In General Election?
After the general election, your Governor prepares a Certificate of Ascertainment listing the names of all the individuals on the slates for each candidate. The Certificate of Ascertainment also lists the number of votes each individual received and shows which individuals were appointed as your State's electors. Your State’s Certificate of Ascertainment is sent to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of the official records of the Presidential election.
The meeting of the electors takes place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December following the general election. The electors meet in their respective States, where they cast their votes for President and Vice President on separate ballots. Your State’s electors’ votes are recorded on a Certificate of Vote, which is prepared at the meeting by the electors. Your State’s Certificate of Vote is sent to Congress, where the votes are counted, and  NARA, as part of the official records of the Presidential election.

Results
Each State’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on the 6th of January in the year following the meeting of the electors. Members of the House and Senate meet in the House Chamber to conduct the official count of electoral votes.
The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.
The President-elect takes the oath of office and is sworn in as President of the United States on January 20th in the year following the general election.
Why Electoral College Established?
The country’s founders created a presidency that has executive power to get things done and is representative of the people so it does not become a dictatorship.
A direct popular vote was not a serious consideration in an era when people were spread throughout the country without today’s communication tools or a developed party system to help them sort through candidates. Elections might frequently have ended with several candidates so close that the House of Representatives would decide the president.
Basing electors on congressional representation mirrors the compromise among states regarding those delegations. States with larger populations are granted a larger, proportionate number of House members, and states with smaller populations are allotted the same number of senators (two) that more populous states have.
The District of Columbia and 48 of the states give all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins their state, whether they squeak by or accumulate thousands more votes. Only Nebraska and Maine allow more than one candidate to win electoral support
Amel Ahmed, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, compares the system to the baseball World Series. “The team that wins the series is not the team that gets the most runs. It’s the team that wins the most games,” she says.
Ahmed says the system gives swing states — those that teeter between parties each election year — an outsize influence on the candidates.
The elections of the past 70 years, which have been competitive and have produced many Republican and Democratic presidents, are proof the system works. The Electoral College has provided a good, competitive, valid elections.

(The Guardian/ ShareAmerica/ Wikipedia)