Ripped From the Headlines! | Free Pronunciation and Vocabulary Lesson

33,189 views ・ 2024-08-27

Rachel's English


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Today, we're studying English with news  while we look at an article about the  
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I'm Rachel and I've been teaching the  
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English language to non-native speakers  of English for over 15 years. Check out  
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Rachelsenglish.com/free to get a free  course on Mastering the American Accent. 
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The headline: Where Harris has gained  and lost support compared with Biden. 
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This is from The New York Times and  it published late last week when  
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Kamala Harris became her party's nominee, she  inherited a democratic Coalition in shambles. 
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Okay, a couple great vocabulary words there.  First, ‘in shambles’. This means something  
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that's become a disaster, it's just fallen  apart. So the Democratic party, it's saying  
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was in shambles. Why was the Democratic party  in shambles? Because there wasn't full support  
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for President Biden running for a second  term. After a tornado goes through a town,  
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it could leave the town in shambles. Coalition, this means alliance. A group  
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of people coming together under a common  goal. In this case, the Democratic party. 
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Let's look at the pronunciation  of the word ‘nominee’. 
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It has last syllable stress. Any word that ends  in ee has last syllable stress. Just like the  
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word ‘absentee’, which is another election  word ‘absentee ballot’ is when you can't go  
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vote in person so you send in an absentee ballot  instead. Absentee, nominee. Last syllable stress. 
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As she wraps up her party's convention  one month later, she's well on her  
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way towards stitching it back together. Stitching it back together. Think of two  
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pieces of fabric torn apart coming back together  and stitching. So, they're using a metaphor here.  
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She's taking the shambles of the democratic party  and she's stitching the party back together. 
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In this month's New York Times Sienna College  Battleground polls, she led Donald J. Trump  
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by two percentage points across the seven  states likeliest to decide the presidency,  
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compared with Mr. Trump's five-point lead in May. What does battleground mean? In the United States  
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we vote with something called an electoral  college, there's a lot to say about it. It  
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can be a little confusing, I'm actually going  to work on another video on that topic that  
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will publish before the election, but for  now let's just say that in certain states,  
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your vote matters more because it's a Battleground  state. That means that it's not clear ahead of  
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time which presidential candidate will win that  State's Electoral College votes because the  
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people that live within that state are pretty  evenly split about which candidate they like. 
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It's then more important for the candidates  to really hit these Battleground States,  
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that's where the votes are really going to  count that can change the election results. 
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It's an enormous shift but Vice  President Harris didn't improve  
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equally among all demographic groups. An enormous shift, a huge change.  
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What does the word demographic mean? This is how we talk about people based  
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on something like race, religion, age, income  level, where they live, these kind of statistics  
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about people. And I don't know if it's this way  in your country but in our country we love to  
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talk about the demographics of voters, the type  of person who typically votes for which candidate. 
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Instead she made big gains on among young  non-white and female voters and made relatively  
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few or no gains among older voters and white men. So here we've got some words defining people by  
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their demographic. We've got young, we've got  older, we've got non-white female, male white men. 
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I just realized I should comment a little bit on  the nominees. So, in the United States to be your  
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party's nominee, you run in a primary, and whoever  wins gets to be the party's nominee that happened  
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for Donald Trump. Now usually, with a president  who's up for a second term nobody runs against  
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that person. That person is the presumptive  nominee. Now, in this case that was Biden,  
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the current president but he stepped down about a  month ago. So that opened the door for who's next.  
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Kamala Harris quickly stepped up and won support  of the party so now she is the party's nominee. 
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So, this article is looking at different groups  of people, of voters and saying compared to May,  
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when Biden was the nominee, where has  Kamala gotten more people to say yes I  
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like the Democrats, and where has Kamala gotten  less people to say yes, I like the Democrats. 
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So we have several demographics here. People  with an income less than $25,000 a year,  
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non-white voters under the age of 45. The number  one place where Harris made gains unsurprisingly,  
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is among people who said they have a somewhat  unfavorable view of Trump. So they don't really  
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like him much but some of them were still willing  to vote for him because they disliked Biden. The  
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issue in the Democratic party is that Biden was  too old and not mentally sharp. Among this group,  
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the Republican candidate Trump still won back in  May with 11 points but now compared to Harris,  
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the Democratic candidate wins by 36 points. A  huge change of 47 points. This says 46 but I  
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believe that should be 47. So it looks like people  who had a somewhat unfavorable view of Trump were  
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still willing to vote for him over Biden. But when  given a different option, they're going for it. 
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By the way, n here is the sample size.  The number of people in this category or  
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demographic who answered the question: Are  you more likely to vote for the Democrat  
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or the Republican in the general election. People whose income is less than $25,000 a  
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year. Biden versus Trump, they were more likely to  vote for Biden but now that Harris is the option  
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they're much more likely to vote for the Democrat.  She gained 20 points here, she gained 17 points  
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for non-white voters under the age of 45. Live in a city. With demographics,  
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people often talk about urban versus rural.  People who live in cities around a lot of  
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people versus people who don't. I know both  of those words can be tricky to pronounce,  
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rural. I actually have a video on how to pronounce  that word so you can search for it on YouTube. 
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But in this case, live in a city this is referring  to urban voters. So Kamala has gained more favor  
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with voters who live in a city who are urban. Women under the age of 45,  
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she's gained ground there. A regular TikTok user. Honestly, I have  
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not ever seen demographics that broke people out  based on social media use, but here it is. Kamala  
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has gained ground with regular TikTok users. People who label themselves as somewhat liberal,  
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they're more in favor of electing  Kamala than they were of electing Biden. 
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Self-identified moderate. So this is somebody  who said says: I feel like I'm more middle of  
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the road. I'm not super liberal, I'm not super  conservative, I'm in the middle, I'm a Centrist,  
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I'm middle of the road when it comes to politics  and my views. I'm moderate. Kamala gained ground  
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with moderates also non-white other in this  case, specifically not Black, not Hispanic, but  
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someone who would identify themselves not as being  white, she has gained also with that demographic. 
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If you draw up a list of President Biden  challenges this cycle, you could probably  
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find a demographic group corresponding to each  one on this list of Mrs. Harris's biggest gains. 
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Draw up a list. Draw up is simply means to  make in this case. To make a list. You might  
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also use this phrasal verb with proposal. We're  going to draw up a proposal and we'll get it to  
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you by Friday. This cycle, that refers to this  election cycle. Not the one four years ago when  
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he won but this cycle, this election. And so now  we go into a lot of different words on how media  
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and other people may divide people into groups. There's young non-white and low-turnout voters.  
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What is a low-turnout voter? This is a group  of people that is not very likely to vote,  
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even though they're of the age where  they can vote in the United States,  
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and the places they tend to live, there's  the lowest income voters who suffered through  
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rising prices, there's even the TikTok users  immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era. 
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Immersed in the bad vibes. When you're immersed in  something, it means you're totally underwater in  
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it, so if you're going to immerse a ball in water  you're going to push it down so it doesn't float.  
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But in this case you can be immersed in something,  in a feeling, in an environment. And here they're  
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immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era. The bad vibes of the Biden era, what does that  
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even mean? Bad vibes is a way to describe  when you don't like something. It's not  
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necessarily specific, it just sort of means  the whole thing. I don't like the whole thing,  
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there's just bad vibes all about it. So on TikTok,  there was a lot of bad vibes about President Biden  
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I'm not actually on TikTok so I didn't know that.  My demographic, I guess I'm just a little too old. 
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The Muslim and Arab voters angry about the war  on Gaza don't make the list but only because of  
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their small sample size, so there were just  55 respondents in August, so I guess that  
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sample size was too small to include here. They  would have been number one on the list with a  
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net swing of 49 points toward Miss Harris. To swing simply means to go in the other  
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direction, the support is swinging towards Harris. The top of the list however is led by an entirely  
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different group. Those with a somewhat  unfavorable view of trump in an extraordinary  
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measure of Mr. Biden's weakness, Mr.  Trump actually led voters who had a  
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somewhat unfavorable view of him back in May. Wow. So what that saying is people who have an  
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unfavorable view of Trump actually kind of  still wanted to vote for Trump over Biden,  
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but a lot of them now that Harris is their option  are saying yep, I'm going to vote for Harris. 
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Now, Miss Harris has a wide lead among this  group at least for the moment. And there's  
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one group that reveals Miss Harris's  distinctive mark on the race: women. 
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Distinctive mark, this means a noticeable  impact. It's clear to see that Kamala Harris  
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has made a difference here. She didn't simply make gains  
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among young and non-white voters, she  made outsize gains among young women. 
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Outsize means more than what you would see in  other groups. More than what you see in other  
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ratios. Her gains there were even bigger. Overall, Miss Harris has gained 11 points  
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compared with Mr. Biden among women while she  improved just three points among men. The shift  
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among women is broad and includes nearly every  demographic group including older white women  
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and white women without a college degree. So again, different ways we separate  
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people. Older versus younger, has a college  degree versus doesn't have a college degree. 
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On the other end of the spectrum,  the top 10 groups where Miss Harris  
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didn't gain much support looks very different. A spectrum is the entire range of something.  
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So they're talking about the spectrum of  demographics. On one end where she made  
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gains is pretty different from the other end  where she didn't make gains or made loses. 
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People who identify as somewhat conservative  were maybe more likely to vote for Biden  
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than they are now for Harris. Because at  this point 10% more would vote for the  
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Republican candidate than for the Democratic  candidate compared to when asked in May. 
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Those who are very conservative also less  likely to vote for Kamala Harris than would  
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have voted for Biden. More likely now  to vote for former president Trump. 
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Let's skip down to number six,  rarely uses social media. Again,  
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this is the first time I've seen people broken  out into social media use in something like this.  
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Maybe it's been happening for several election  cycles but it's the first time I've seen it. 
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So she made a little gain. She gained a little  ground over Biden from that demographic. 
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Rural, again that tricky word, opposite of urban,  rural. She made a small gain among rural voters. 
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Number seven, honestly I'm surprised by that.  When they asked people who voted for Trump in  
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2020 who they would vote for now. In May, 93%  said I will vote for Trump, but now in August,  
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91% said they would vote for Trump. So Kamala  gained a little bit from that group of people. 
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Many of the groups sticking by Mr. Trump are  those where no Democrat can realistically  
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make big gains like Republicans, Trump 2020  voters, self-described “very conservative”  
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voters and those with a very favorable view of  Mr. Trump. I'm going to skip ahead here a bit. 
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One group that stands out for not being  a relative strength for Miss Harris:  
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non-white voters over 45. Mr. Biden held his  own among these voters and still held around  
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70% of their votes in our last round of polls.  But perhaps the most telling area of weakness of  
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all for Miss Harris is among white men. Although  she made outsize gains among women and non-white  
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voters, white men barely budged it all. There's that word again, outsize. She  
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made outsized gains even bigger than expected,  bigger than compared to other demographic groups. 
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And white men over 65, a level of grand  granularity not included in the table  
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actually shifted 6 points toward Mr. Trump. What does the word granularity mean? 
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A level of granularity, when you get granular.  That means they're going smaller and smaller  
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to study something. So this table that we  saw didn't have all of the granularity from  
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the study. In other words it had bigger groups of  demographics but not like the really small ones,  
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like the one here. It just didn't have that level  of granularity in this publication of the results. 
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There are so many ways we divide people. White,  non-white, older, younger, conservative, moderate,  
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liberal, and honestly I feel like elections  make those differences feel so important.  
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I'm lucky enough in Philadelphia to live in  a very diverse area politically. Right in my  
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little neighborhoods, there are people of all  different views. And I've got to say that's  
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really challenged me because for me it's more  comfortable to just hang out with people that  
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think like me. But I've definitely come to  realize that that's not the right way to live  
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our lives because that's not really the country  that I want. I do want a country where we're  
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talking about our differences with each other. And as I read articles like this I think about  
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how much these divisions, these demographic  divisions play a part in our lives because  
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of what we're told but what it comes down to  is just person-to-person communication and  
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care. And that's one thing that I've really  learned from being an English teacher from  
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teaching non-native English speakers is I've  learned that there's so much about a person  
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that I don't know when I first meet them  and everybody has an interesting story even  
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if demographically they seem really different.  There is always a way to connect with somebody. 
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So to end, I'm just going to say no matter how you  get categorized or how you categorize yourself,  
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I value you. Thank you for watching this  video, I love so much being your English  
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teacher. Please check out this video and  be sure to subscribe with notifications  
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on so you never miss another lesson. That's it  and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.
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