I hate to break this to you, America, but Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are not running for president of the United States.

Not all of them, anyway. Not even most of them.

In spite of what you may have heard, that’s not how elections work here.

In America these days, a person hoping to be president of the United States only has to run in seven states.

Arizona, where I live, is one of them. The others are Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The other 43 states, where most Americans live, do not matter.

Sorry.

News operations call us “swing states” or “battleground states.” What that means, essentially, is we’re states that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can take for granted.

The reason is the Electoral College.

In our country’s winner-take-all system, the presidential candidate who gets the most votes in a state — even if just by one vote — gets all of its electoral votes.

States get electors based........

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