Everything you ever wanted to know about the US Presidential election - but were afraid to ask

The gender gap is a standard feature of US elections. Women are more likely to vote Democrat than men, and have been throughout the modern era, but they have never overwhelmingly rejected a nominee supported by a majority of men before.

How much of this is down to the historic nature of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as the first female president in waiting, and how much is down to Trump’s boorish behaviour is hard to assess. What is certain is that she has run the most explicitly feminist campaign ever: witness her answer to the question about Supreme Court justices at the third presidential debate, assertively defending the right of women to decide whether to have an abortion.

Clinton waited until the last week before the election to use Trump’s comments about grabbing women “by the pussy” in a campaign ad. The new spot being broadcast in eight swing states also shows him saying “putting a wife to work is a dangerous thing,” adding that when he gets home and dinner isn’t ready “I go through the roof.”

Since the tape of Trump boasting that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” surfaced, more than a dozen women have come forward to accuse him of groping them: Jill Harth, Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds, Mindy McGillivray, Natasha Stoynoff, Summer Zervos, Kristin Anderson, Cathy Heller, Jennifer Murphy, Karena Virginia, Temple Taggart McDowell, Ninni Laaksonen, Cassandra Searles.

This doesn’t count Ivana Trump, who testified under oath during divorce proceedings that her husband violently raped her, in a rage over botched scalp surgery. She has since said that she did not mean rape in a “literal or criminal” sense, but has never retracted the claim.

In June, a woman filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Trump raped her in 1994, when she was thirteen-years-old. In the complaint, ‘Jane Doe’ claims that Trump and his billionaire friend Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted paedophile, used her as a sex slave. In a sworn declaration, Epstein’s ‘party planner’ at the time says she witnessed both men having sex with her. Trump is due in court on December 16 for a pretrial hearing. His lawyer says the charges are “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated.”

On the campaign trail in Gettsyburg, Pennsylvania, Trump denied ever groping a woman without her consent. “The events never happened, never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” The crowd cheered, but nationally fewer than a third of voters believe his denials. In a Washington Post poll, 68% of respondents said he has “probably” made unwanted sexual advances.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are large numbers of secret Hillary supporters among Republican women, but there is little data to back this up. In Marie Claire, Lyz Lenz reported that many of her friends in an Evangelical Christian community in Iowa will vote Democrat for the first time.

“I think we’ll see a lot of women walk away from the party over this,” Republican strategist Katie Packer said. “It’s not about the sex: it’s about the crime and the indignity and the accountability of somebody who has bragged about this.… To be constantly treating this as no big deal - that’s the insult.”

On Fox News, host Megyn Kelly gave Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich (himself a serial adulterer) a dressing down when he accused her of being “fascinated with sex” for raising the allegations of sexual misconduct. “You know what, Mr. Speaker, I’m not fascinated by sex, but I am fascinated by protection of women and understanding what we’re getting in the Oval Office,” she said.

Trump’s description of Clinton as “such a nasty woman” at the third presidential debate has become a rallying cry for her supporters. “Get this Donald,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told the crowd at a Clinton rally in New Hampshire, to whoops of excitement. “Nasty women vote. And, on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”

Hillary's emails

How much has the email scandal hurt Hillary Clinton? The short answer is that a fortnight ago, she appeared almost certain to become the next President of the United States of America. Suddenly, the race is too close to call. An ABC poll showed the Democratic and Republican nominees tied at 44% each, with third party candidates accounting for the rest.

The longer answer begins with a question: which email scandal? The media has a tendency to conflate the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State with the slow drip of revelations from the hacked emails of John Podesta, Chairman of Hillary for America.

FBI Director James Comey’s decision to send a letter to Congress, revealing that emails pertinent to the Clinton investigation had been found on a laptop belonging to her chief of staff, Huma Abedin, has been sharply criticised by both Democrats and Republicans.

George W Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the letter was “probably inconsistent with protocol, so in that sense, you have to question the decision.” Former Congressman Joe Walsh, a leading figure in the Tea Party, tweeted that Clinton should have been prosecuted months ago, but to release the letter eleven days before the election was “wrong and unfair to Hillary”.

Comey’s move was a clear breach of FBI guidelines. Why did he do it? Most speculation has centred on a group of rogue agents that may have threatened to leak the information. On October 30, a Twitter account, FBIRecordsVault, mysteriously reactivated after a year of silence to dump documents related to Bill Clinton’s controversial final day pardon of indicted fraudster (and Democratic mega-donor) Marc Rich.

Steve Pieczenik, who served in the Department of State under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, described Comey’s letter as the start of a “counter-coup” against the Clintons by “patriotic Americans” in the intelligence services.

“We have initiated a counter-coup, through Julian Assange and Wikileaks… [Comey’s letter] was the entree for many of us in the counter-coup to say to the administration ‘we have your number… we’re going to stop you from making Hillary the President of the Unites States.’”

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be much in the 650,000 reported emails. They didn’t come from Clinton and the Clinton camp didn’t knowingly conceal them. The FBI is rushing to analyse them, using specialist software, to establish whether they’re duplicates of emails that have already been read during the investigation. Any announcement, whether dismissing their importance or releasing new information, would be a bombshell before Election Day.

Comey’s letter is damaging to Clinton because it fits into an existing narrative, indeed a story that Republicans have been telling about her for twenty-five years. Trump, handy with a nickname, didn’t choose ‘Crooked Hillary’ for no reason - despite her having been cleared of all claims of wrong-doing against her.

So far this year, Wikileaks has released twenty batches of emails from Podesta’s account: a slow drip of poison designed to reinforce the notion that Clinton cannot be trusted. In the latest, adviser Doug Band refers to “Bill Clinton Inc.” and observes: “Everyone takes, everyone.”

The major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC have devoted more time in their nightly news broadcasts to covering Clinton’s emails than all policy issues combined. It is hard to overstate how much coverage of this election has focused on personalities and the horse race.

Analyst Andrew Tyndall counted just over half an hour of news reports about the issues in nine months of network news broadcasts, excepting daily campaign coverage in which issues were covered in passing. Even this tiny chunk of airtime was mostly devoted to discussing terrorism, foreign policy and immigration.

“No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits,” wrote Tyndall. Clinton’s emails were considered more important than all of them.

Clinton’s reflexive secrecy (and understandable hostility to the press) has hurt her. But the reason she is consistently seen as less honest and trustworthy than Donald Trump - a candidate who by the Toronto Star’s reckoning, told at least 378 lies in 25 days on the campaign trail this autumn - is that the mainstream media has given credence to conservative smears throughout her three decades in public service.

Early voting

In the final week before Election Day, partisans study the early voting totals almost as neurotically as the latest polls.

The best news for Hillary Clinton’s campaign is coming out of Nevada, a state where early and absentee votes accounted for 70% of the total ballots cast in 2012. Nevada records the registration of early voters and keeps a running total, broken down by party and by county.

Polls may suggest a very tight contest, but the suspicion that they are underestimating Hispanic engagement has been borne out by voting in Clark County, which is dominated by the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Democrats already boast a 55,000 vote edge there, and are keeping Republican margins down in Reno, a more conservative city.

Outside of the major cities, Nevada is a sparsely-populated desert state. More than two-thirds of its voters live in Clark County. Jon Ralston, the most respected voting analyst in the state, has said: “Unless there are seriously strange voting patterns going on, this is just about over here for Trump.”

The picture is more promising for Republicans in North Carolina. In the first twelve days of early voting, white voters cast 72% of the ballots and blacks 22%. At this point last year the figures were 67% and 27%.

This may be a result of GOP efforts to suppress the African-American vote, including striking registered voters from the rolls and cutting the number of polling stations in heavily black counties. In Guilford County, which opened just one voting site in the first week of early voting (there were sixteen in 2012) the number of ballots cast dropped from to 88,383 from 100,761 four years ago.

It may also indicate that blacks are less motivated to show up without the nation’s first African-American president at the top of the ticket. Barack Obama has been rallying support for Clinton in Greensboro, Fayetteville and Charlotte, telling North Carolina voters: “The fate of the republic rests on your shoulders.”

Weak African-American enthusiasm for Clinton would be a huge problem in Florida, and the early signs are not good. Political science professor Daniel Smith studied participation rates in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties, and found that 40% of early voters were white, 22% black and 31% Hispanic. Four years ago at this point the breakdown was 35% white, 36% black and 23% Hispanic.

Clinton may be making up for reduced African-American turnout with greater numbers of Latinos and educated white women. That seems to be the case in Colorado and Virginia, where Democrats have the edge in ballots cast. In Ohio, Republicans have been buoyed by lower than anticipated turnout in Cuyahoga County, which contains the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland. As with the polls, it is possible for optimists on either side to cherry-pick results and feel like they’re winning.

One major caveat: predicting final outcomes from early votes is a risky business. Early voters tend to be more committed partisans, and have also skewed to the Democrats in recent years. Plus, the number of independent/unaffiliated early voters has risen sharply, particularly in North Carolina and Florida. Is this a sign that Trump’s candidacy is expanding the electorate, or that moderate voters are motivated to defeat him? We will find out in Tuesday.

The path to the White House

If Donald Trump cannot win Florida and Ohio, he almost certainly cannot secure the 270 electoral college votes he needs to be elected president. Without Florida’s 29 electors and Ohio’s 18, he has to turn too many reliably blue states red. He probably needs to win North Carolina too, a state that has swung from Republican to Democratic and back again in the last two presidential elections.

Hillary Clinton’s “firewall” is made up of states where she has consistently enjoyed a lead in the polls: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, Maine and New Mexico. If the polls are right, or close enough, she will get to 272 electoral college votes by winning these nine competitive states in addition to Democratic bankers such as California and New York.

Assuming Trump wins Nevada - which is looking less likely by the day as early returns come in - he needs to peel off one of these. He has been spending a lot of time in Michigan and Wisconsin, which last chose a Republican for president in 1988 and 1984 respectively. Clinton has a fragile lead of under 4% in the polls in both states. Demographically, they appear to be fertile ground for Trump, due to the high proportion of non college-educated white voters.

Clinton could pull off a shock victory in Arizona, Iowa or Georgia. Mormon distaste for Trump could propel independent Evan McMullin - described by Vanity Fair magazine as 'The Man Donald Trump Has Never Heard of Who Could Cost Him the Election' - to victory in Utah. Trump has fewer options and a much narrower path to victory.

This doesn’t mean that he can’t win. If the race continues to tighten, he could win Pennsylvania, Colorado, or both - enough electoral college votes to offset losses elsewhere. Clinton could win the popular vote, by doing better than a typical Democrat in red states like Texas and Arizona, but still come up short of the 270 electoral college votes she needs.

One last, only slightly far-fetched scenario (but then how many times have we seen the unbelievable become reality in this race): if Trump wins Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire, the candidates would be tied at 269 electoral college votes each. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives would then pick the next president: Trump.

The first 100 days

Policy discussions have been drowned out by personality clashes and scandals in an election campaign shockingly low on substance. Here’s what the candidates would hope to achieve in their first hundred days as president.

Donald Trump

Much of Trump’s agenda is based on undoing Executive Orders and legislation enacted in the last eight years under President Barack Obama. He has said he will “repeal and replace Obamacare,” cut two federal regulations for every new rule issued, “immediately suspend admission of Syrian refugees” and cancel every “unconstitutional executive action” enacted by the current president.

Trump has promised to “begin implementing plans for construction of a wall along our southern border” - to keep out all those Mexicans he called rapists - renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and call a meeting with NATO members to discuss the “financial commitments” of member states. He also says he will ban all Muslims from entering the US.

He has sworn to pass “the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan” including a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%. Non-partisan tax analysts say his proposal will reduce government revenues by more than $7 trillion over a decade and disproportionately benefit the richest Americans. Of course, Trump - born rich and set up in business with a massive handout from his father - has boasted of avoiding paying personal federal income taxes for years.

To “drain the swamp” of Washington D.C., he will impose term limits on members of Congress and bar government officials from taking lobbying jobs for five years after they leave public service. He has proposed a hiring freeze on federal employees.

Hillary Clinton

Clinton has sought to draw a contrast with Trump’s isolationist agenda by promising to invest in American jobs to make the country more competitive in the global economy. "We're not going to build a giant wall. We’re going to build roads and bridges and tunnels and ports and airports and water systems and a new electric grid,” she told supporters in Pennsylvania.

To pay for this, she proposes a 4% surtax on all income over $5 million. She has promised that taxes will not go up for any families earning less than $250,000 per year. Independent tax analysts estimate that for the richest 1% of Americans, tax bills will rise by more than $800,000 per year.

Clinton would push for a national minimum wage of $12 per hour (rather than the $15 per hour sought by supporters of Bernie Sanders) and seek to drastically reduce the cost of university education, to make it debt-free for most students.

Two of Clinton’s biggest policy initiatives would require the votes of congressional Republicans, as Democrats are unlikely to take back the House of Representatives or win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. If the GOP is soundly defeated, co-operation on comprehensive immigration reform is a possibility. Gun control measures are unlikely to get past Republican obstruction, even though they are supported by a majority of Americans.

One of the few things that candidates agree on is the urgent need for campaign finance reform, to address the pay-to-play system of unlimited anonymous donations introduced by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.