Speaking English Made Easy: How To Talk About Presidential Elections

With the election around the corner, I  thought I would make a video

for my students around the world to help them understand how the 

presidential election works in the United States. 

I'm Rachel and I've been teaching the  American accent   

and English as a second language here on YouTube for over 15 years, 

check out rachelsenglish.com/free to get my free course on Mastering the American accent.

In the United States, we use an electoral college system. So each state

is given a certain number of electoral college votes. Let's look at this map. 

So underneath each state abbreviation,

you'll see the number of electoral college votes that state has.

Now, let's take Florida for example. This is  a state where I was born and raised

and I did vote on my 18th birthday.  

My birthday is November 5. This year, the election is on my birthday and when

I turned 18, there was a presidential  election on my birthday.

So, I got to vote for the president on my birthday, it was pretty fun.

When you're 18 that's when you become eligible  

to vote in the United States. So, let's take  the State of Florida for example. It has 30  

Electoral College votes. So out of all of  the people in Florida, they're going to  

cast their votes for the Republican nominee  or the Democratic nominee or a third party,  

and it doesn't matter how many votes anyone gets outside of the winning

candidate. So, even if there's a candidate there that wins by just one  

total vote, the State of Florida all 30 of those votes go towards that

one winning candidate. So, in other words we don't use a popular vote  

in the United States. It's not one vote  cast equals one vote for that candidate,  

but it goes state by state whichever candidate wins that State,

wins all the Electoral College votes. Then you add up the Electoral 

College votes, and whoever gets to 270 wins. 

Now, I should say there are a few states that split their Electoral College votes.

That would be both Maine and Nebraska.

All the other 48 states, it's all or nothing. The winner gets everything and second  

place even if they got almost as many votes, they get nothing. 

This map is colored according to projected winner of those votes.

So, if it's a very dark blue that means it's very likely that the Democrat will win that state.  

If it's a lighter blue, then it's less likely.  

If it's a dark red, then it's very likely that the Republican candidate in this case, 

Donald Trump will win the state, and the lighter the color the less likely it is. 

And then we have these tan States, and  those are states where it's a toss-up.  

It's too early to tell who will win. Will it be Donald Trump or will it be Kamala Harris. 

Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't  love the Electoral College.

Let me show you why. 

I just looked it up. Idaho has 1,44,380 registered voters and they get four votes  

in the Electoral College. Pennsylvania on the other hand has 8,838 ,100 registered voters  

and 19 Electoral College votes. So if you do the math one Electoral College vote in Idaho 

is made by 23,5 195 people voting.

One in Pennsylvania is equal to 465,000 people voting. 

In other words, in Pennsylvania many more people are represented by one vote

in the Electoral College.  

In other words, my vote, my voice is deluded, is less important, it's less loud,  

because I have to join with 400,000 other people to make one vote

whereas in Idaho, they can join with almost half as many people to make their vote.  

So, basically my vote counts less because my vote is a smaller fraction of an

electoral college vote than in other states and there are  

probably no states where it's exactly even.

So, yeah I wish we just had a popular vote  

in the United States but we don't. So,  what does that mean? Let's look at how  

that's played out in the last few elections.

This is the map showing the Electoral College wins  

of each candidate in the 2016 election when Donald Trump won.

You can see he easily got to 270 votes,  by getting all of the Electoral College votes

for all of these red states. But if you look at the popular vote, you can see that  

Donald Trump got 62 million and Hillary Clinton got 65 million. So,  

she actually won the popular vote, more  people voted for her but because of the  

way that the electoral map works,

the more people that voted for her were in states where their vote was a little bit weaker.  

So, Donald Trump ended up winning the election,  

this has only happened twice in the history of the United States

but it has happened more recently. It happened in 2016 

and it happened in 2000. So, to me that's one issue with the Electoral  

College. Another issue that I feel like  the Electoral College makes apparent,  

is that honestly, I think cheating and fraud  becomes more of a problem.

You might only have  

to turn one state, one close battleground  swing state in order to make an election  

different, the election outcome different.

Let's compare the map from the 2016 election to the 2020 election.  

There are several states that swung. They changed from voting Republican in 2016  

to voting Democrat in 2020. Wisconsin changed from red to blue,

Georgia changed from red to blue, Arizona changed from red to blue,

Pennsylvania changed from red to blue. If you're confused about this state here  

and why it doesn't have a label, it's actually just part of Michigan. 

On election night, I always think it's exciting  to watch the returns

as they come in. The returns  

would be all of the counted votes and it  goes county by county. So, for example,  

in Alachua county in Florida where I grew up, 

they may report their votes before a different county has finished counting.  

And as soon as enough of the votes are in to make a call, the network that you're 

watching will call the state and you'll see all of those Electoral  

College votes go in the column of that candidate.

Living in Pennsylvania, voting in Pennsylvania,  

I'm very interested to see how this goes.

I grew up in Florida, I cast my first vote there. Then I moved to Indiana

for college, then I moved to Massachusetts for graduate school,  

then New York City and now I'm in Pennsylvania.

So you can see I've lived in red States, I've lived in blue States,  

and now I'm in a swing state.So, those are the basics of how the Electoral  

College works and how the Electoral college is different from a popular vote and how a person  

can actually win the popular vote but not win the presidency in the United States of America. 

I'll be casting my vote on my birthday  November 5th, will you?

Keep your learning going now with this video and don't forget to subscribe 

with notifications on, I love being your English teacher.  

That's it and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.