﻿Aw yeah! So after a nail-biting close election we finally know that Joe Biden has been elected
the next President of the United States. Now, election day or polling day is the day
on which elections are held. Now while we usually know the results by Tuesday night,
you might have been asking yourself, like so many people out there,
why did it take so long this year? Actually, on Wednesday, Joe Biden himself had this to say:
So after the popularity of the recent lesson that we made with the Biden-Trump debate, we thought
that we'd throw together this lesson to help you to understand the American electoral system,
which will help you to understand exactly why the elections took so long this year.
And of course you'll also be learning a lot of political vocabulary that you'll find extremely
practical if you've been watching the news, because it's brought up all the time. And finally
we'll learn with some clips from Joe Biden's victory speech, after becoming President-elect.
All right, so now let's learn all of the most difficult vocabulary and expressions from that
clip, but really quickly before we do, I want to let you know that if you're new here every
single week we make great lessons like this one to help you understand fast speaking natives. Without
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So rigged means to dishonestly arrange the results of an election
or a competition. Another word we can use that means the same thing is fixed.
Now, Trump thought or at least tried to make people believe
that the votes were not counted correctly. So he thought that the whole thing was rigged. Polls
are the process of voting in an election, and this is also the name of the place where we go to vote.
To sue someone it means to take legal action against that person. Now you might have heard
some talk that Trump wants to sue the people in charge of counting the votes in different states.
So a different way that we could say this is that Trump is wanting to take these people to court.
Now this is probably the number one thing you need to understand about american elections.
So the electoral college is a unique and also very controversial method for indirectly selecting who
will be the President of the United States. So the United States we don't actually vote directly for
the President. The electoral college are eeducated individuals who vote in your place and each state
has a designated number of electoral votes, based on the population of that state. So whoever wins
the popular vote in a certain state, the electoral college should vote for that individual. Now this
is controversial because it means that you don't actually need to win the popular vote. In the
United States, in order to be elected President, and that also makes certain states that often go
one way or another way really crucial in order to win, and we'll talk more about that in a little
bit. Now, if you follow the 2016 elections then you might remember that Hillary Clinton won the
popular vote, but she actually lost in the electoral college. Which means that although
the majority of citizens voted for her, she did not become the President of United States. Now,
if you followed the elections you might have seen the number 270. You need 270 votes to win. Now
this is because there are 538 electoral college seats. Now 270 would be the majority of that,
so if you get that majority or more then you win. Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral
college vote in these elections. Now the pandemic also played a huge role in this year's elections.
Let's hear what Biden had to say about that. Do you want to be able to understand the English
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Now, Biden says he doesn't see blue states or red states, he just sees the United States. This is a
nice play on words here, but let's take a look at what this actually means. So, blue states and red
states refer to states that are more democratic or more republican. So blue states are the ones that
are more liberal they're the ones, that vote more for the Democratic party, which is Joe Biden's
party. Now, red states on the other hand are more conservative, they're more represented by the
Republican party, which is Donald Trump's party. Now in some states it's really predictable whether
a state will vote red or vote blue, but there's some states that are much more unpredictable.
We call these swing states. Now this is because from election to election they swing in one
direction or in the other. Now, in one election process these states might find themselves more on
the democratic side and another one they might vote more for the Republican candidate. Now,
as we mentioned earlier, many times elections are decided by how these swing states vote. And that
is why they're also often called "battleground states". So Presidential Candidates fight for
votes there, and usually their campaigning in these states is much more aggressive. Now, this
comes from the word battleground, which of course is a place where an actual battle is fought.
Now if you've been following the news then there's probably some states that maybe you can't even
place on the map but that you've been hearing a lot about in these elections. For example,
Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. These are all swing states and they
really were crucial in determining the results of this year's elections.
Now, Joe Biden mentions people from all sorts of different political backgrounds. For example,
here he mentions people who are more Progressive, Moderate or Conservative. So people who are more
Progressive tend to be much more liberal in their political views. So for example,
they would support a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to get an abortion.
Conservatives, on the other hand, want to keep things exactly how they already are now. We tend
to say that Liberal people or Progressives tend to lean left, and Conservatives lean right. So
we can think of this as a political spectrum. Now the further left you go, the more Liberal someone
would be. And the further right you go, the more Conservative someone would be. Now people from the
Democratic party lean more to the left, and people from the Republican party lean more to the right.