US elections, the battle in six states for the 6% undecided

This is the election of records. Record seniority of the White House candidates, 81-year-old Joe Biden and 78-year-old Donald Trump. Record spending, over ten billion. However, they may also and above all go down in history as the six-by-six ballot box. Decided in November by a tiny number of states and uncertain voters.

The vote is months away, but the political campaign in the United States seems destined for a photo finish, spurring strategists to dissect public opinion leanings as never before. Polls show a substantial head-to-head, around 45%, in a climate made more volatile by the general disapproval of the 2020 rematch.

The impasse certainly betrays the gravity of the unknowns. On Trump hover four criminal trials, doubts about his vocation for democracy, extreme rhetoric and controversial social and cultural crusades (against abortion). On Biden concerns about age, an economy troubled by inflation and domestic and foreign emergencies from immigration to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, with the Israeli-Palestinian drama triggering protests among young people.

But the future of the White House, due to the increasing polarisation of the country and its electoral system, despite the vastness of the challenges now appears to be in the hands of ever narrower swathes of regions and voters. The six-by-six formula, in fact, sees half a dozen states in the Midwest and Southwest as the absolute protagonists, where a 6% slice of 'persuadable' voters is up for grabs.

The magnificent six battlegrounds? Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, once the heart of the Blue Wall, the industrial-electoral wall of Biden's Democratic Party cracked by Trumpian populism. Then Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, once conservative fiefdoms and now more diverse. In 2020 Biden won them all by a narrow margin. In 2016 it was Trump who had swept through Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and snatched the presidency.