US election: These swing states will decide whether Trump or Harris wins

All the current polling in the US presidential election sends the same message: Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are essentially tied in the national vote.

While a few surveys put one or the other ahead, their results generally fall within the margin of error.

However, because of the US' Electoral College system, the election will be decided not by the national popular vote but by the combination of states each of the candidates wins.

As in every election, only a handful of states are truly competitive this year, and thus get the bulk of the campaigns' attention in the race's final weeks as the two sides seek an advantage in a handful of flippable places.

In the last two elections, some of these states were decided by just tens of thousands of votes out of millions cast, meaning either Harris or Trump could end up winning by tiny margins, whichever way the overall national vote goes.

Based on recent elections and current polling evidence, there are seven states definitively in play — plus some longer shots that might just deliver a surprise.

11 electoral votes

2016: Trump +3.5%

2020: Biden +0.3%

On election night 2020, Republican-friendly Fox News enraged the Trump campaign by becoming the first major network to call Arizona for Joe Biden.

It took several days for most other outlets to agree on a definitive result, and Biden's margin of victory was strikingly small: fewer than 10,500 votes out of nearly 3.4 million cast.

This result was all the more stunning because no Democrat had won the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. While the Democrats had seen some success in statewide races, talk of the state's demographics shifting in their favour had yet to result in a presidential victory, though