The coming days will see the world's attention focused on the American election.

Actually people have already started voting all over the world, for as the repeated ads tell us, a US voter can cast the vote anywhere in the world, unlike us.

The US is not the biggest democracy in the world - that is India. But it is overwhelmingly the most important one in the world and its outcome carries implications for practically the whole world.

Obviously in the present state of the world it's the situation in the Middle East that many think will be affected by the outcome of the US election but that may be a wrong perception because whoever wins in the US will most probably continue to support Israel.

Nor will the outcome of the US election sway matters between Russia and the Ukraine though Trump positions himself as friendlier with Russia. And hopes to end the fighting within days.

Who will win? The battle of the opinion polls has been going on for the past months and has already collected a scalp, that of President Joe Biden who was forced to give up when the polls consistently showed that he would be beaten by Trump.

Then Kamala Harris became the Democrat candidate but the polls have not showed that consistent advantage one would have expected from her, given her relative youth and Trump's own mistakes and bombastic talk.

In a way, abortion could once again be the defining issue, with Trump representing all those who want to ban it or at least limit it and Harris, who doesn't have children herself, trying to keep abortion available.

As regards the economy the Republicans have always been libertarians while the Democrats have always been on the side of the unions and workers' rights. For all that, even under the Democrats the economy has been doing well.

This may be also due to the influx of immigrants which Trump says he will harass and curtail.

As usual then it's the party that gets out the vote that gets the final victory and here Trump is at an advantage because it's harder, much harder to get today's youth enthusiastic about anything.

Then there's spin and elections from Russia to South Africa to the US have become huge training grounds for all sorts of spin.

All this, especially the last point, have special relevance to us, given the next election is only months away. The fact that last weekend we had two diametrically opposed predictions with as it happened the same advantage of votes on either side shows that the games have started already.

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