This story originally appeared in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2020. TOKYO — The USA is coming up on a presidential election. In-person voting commences on Nov. 3. National polls are a good guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, but they’re not necessarily a good way to predict the result of the election. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton led in the polls and won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost — that’s because the U.S. uses an electoral system which gives more weight to individual states, so winning the most votes doesn’t always win you the election. Winning so-called key states does.