Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, I want to focus on a specific part of American culture, because there is a big cultural event occurring this week in the United States.
If you are watching this episode or listening to this episode when it comes out, then it is the day before the presidential election here in the US.
We will be electing our next president tomorrow and maybe we'll know who the winner is, maybe we won't, because we have this odd system here in the United States.
We have something called the electoral college and it's a little confusing.
So on today's episode, I want to talk about the electoral college, what it is, why it started and if you're interested in watching the election results, what you should look for to figure out who is going to be the next president of the United States.
Before we begin, I just want to remind you to look in the description of this podcast episode and all of our previous podcast episodes.
There you will find a vocabulary list of the words and phrases along with the definitions that I used during the episode.
You can take these words, put them into your own vocabulary learning system and hopefully start using them in conversation yourself.
Now let's talk about the electoral college.
What I want to talk about is why it was created, why we have this confusing system.
The system, which is called the electoral college, dates back to 1787.
That's a long time ago.
If you think back to American history, the United States officially declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776.
That means that it was created right when the country was being founded and right when the country was trying to determine how elections should occur in the United States.
One of the reasons why the electoral college was created was because at the time there was the thought that the average American voter would not be informed enough to correctly vote for their choice of presidential candidate.
They thought that people would be uninformed.
And if you think back to the time 1787, there wasn't the internet, there weren't cell phones, there wasn't TV and cable news.
So people had less resources and less availability of the news to follow along and learn about the candidates who were running for president.
A lot of people also weren't literate, which means that they weren't able to read.
So even if there were newspapers that talked about the presidential candidates, they may not be able to read them.
Because of this worry that people might not be correctly informed in order to vote for the correct candidate, the idea of the electoral college was created.
What this means is that from each state, there are people who are called electors.
These people represent each state and they are the ones who are able to vote for president.
In theory, they should be voting for the person that their state voted for for president.
However, because it was thought that the average voter might not be informed enough, there was a fear that people might vote for someone who would be bad for the job of presidency.
Someone who might want to overtake the presidency, try to take power and destroy the Constitution.
So there was discretion given to the electors.
Now what discretion means is that they were able to use their own judgment.
If their state voted for someone who was like that, someone who would be a dictator, who would be bad for the job of presidency, they would be able to use their discretion and vote for somebody else.
They weren't tied to vote for the person that their state voted for.
It would be up to them.
The second reason that the electoral college was formed was because of the power structure of the United States and what was occurring when the electoral college was created.
In 1787, there was still slavery in the United States.
If you don't know the history of slavery in the United States, just one important thing to know is that there were states that allowed slavery and states that did not.
The states that did not were usually in the northern part of the country, what we call the North when we refer to this time period, and the places that allowed slavery were in the South.
When it came to who was allowed to vote at this time, it was usually white men who were allowed to vote.
Women, at the time, were not guaranteed the right to vote and people who were African -American or slaves were not also allowed to vote in a lot of cases.
In the North, if you were a male, you might be able to vote regardless of what race you were, but in the South, you were not allowed to vote.
States that allowed slavery, the states that were in the South, were worried about this difference, that there were states in the North where more people were allowed to vote versus states in the South where less people were allowed to vote.
The states in the South were worried that these states in the North, because they had more voters, would have more power.
If the North had more power, they could get rid of slavery and they could change what was occurring in the South.
These southern states did not want this to happen and they wanted to be able to keep slaves and keep slavery going.
Because of that, this electoral college system was created.
What happened was that states that allowed for slavery counted people who were enslaved as three -fifths of a person.
Now, I know this is extremely confusing, but what they did was they counted an enslaved person as less than a full human being.
They counted them as a fraction of a human being.
That is the reason why the electoral college system is so controversial.
One of the main reasons that it was created was because it was created to protect slavery and give power to slave states.
That power structure made it so that states that were more rural, that had farms and plantations on them, states that had less people and states where white people were the people who were in power, had more power overall compared to the amount that they should have had.
They had as much power as the northern states that were more popular, that were more diverse, that had more cities.
This power structure still continues today.
The electoral college system still benefits these states and gives more power to the states that tend to be less diverse than the United States is as a whole and states that tend to be more rural, states that have less people, have more farmland.
The second reason that people want to get rid of the electoral college is because it does not matter what the popular vote for president is here in the United States.
Popular vote means the person that wins the most votes.
Now in most countries and most democracies, the person who wins the most votes is the person who wins.
However, when it comes to the presidential election here in the U .S., that doesn't matter.
I can say that there have been nine presidential elections in my lifetime.
The Democratic Party has won seven of the popular votes out of the nine elections that have occurred in my lifetime.
The Democratic Party is the more popular party.
There are more people who vote for the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, which is the second party here in the United States.
And that is one of the reasons why I don't like looking at national polls, polls that tell you who more people are going to vote for on a national level.
However, this doesn't matter.
In 2000 and in 2016, the Democratic candidate that won the popular vote did not win the presidency.
That is one thing I'm going to say for this presidential election.
I can almost guarantee you that Kamala Harris will win the popular vote.
She will be the person who the majority of people who are voting will vote for.
However, she is not guaranteed to win the presidency.
Instead, the person who wins the most electoral college votes is the person who wins the presidency.
Let's now talk about how the electoral college system works and how someone wins the electoral college.
The electoral college is out of 538 votes and it is split between all 50 states.
Each state gets a certain amount of electors, and that is based off of the number of members in Congress.
So the person who gets the most votes for that particular state wins the electoral college votes.
Like I said, originally, the thought was that the electors would have some discretion that they could decide who to vote for, but that no longer occurs.
If you win the popular vote from the state, you win the electors from that state.
However, there is a little bit of an interesting part to this.
That system where you win all of the electoral college votes from that particular state is called a winner -take -all system.
Whoever won that particular state in terms of the popular vote wins all of the electors from that state.
That's a winner -take -all system.
However, there are two states that do not do this.
Maine and Nebraska are the two states that actually split their electoral college votes and the different districts in the state each award electors.
I say that now when I am recording this.
However, there has been some effort by the Republican Party to get rid of the system in Nebraska.
The reason is is that there is something called a blue dot in Nebraska.
The big city in Nebraska, like most cities in the United States, tends to vote for the Democratic candidate.
And if you look at a map of the electoral college votes, if you look at Nebraska, you will see a blue dot in the state that represents that particular district that votes for the Democratic candidate.
The Republican Party is in charge in Nebraska and they're trying to get rid of that system, the current system, and change to a winner -take -all system because it would benefit the Republican Party.
Like I said right now, it's not a winner -take -all system, but I don't know the future.
Maybe when this episode comes out, the rules might have changed and Nebraska might be a winner -take -all system, but we'll see.
We'll have to just wait and see.
Now, there are some states that are guaranteed to vote for one party or guaranteed to vote for another.
For example, I live in California.
California is a state that we call a blue state.
Blue state is a state that is going to vote for the Democratic Party and who always votes for the Democratic Party.
California is one of these states that always votes Democrat.
The Democratic Party is in power in California and Kamala Harris will for sure win the Electoral College votes from California.
On the other hand, there are states that we call red states.
These states are states that always vote Republican.
For example, Alabama, one of the states in the South, that state will for sure vote for the Republican candidate for president and they always vote for the Republican candidate for president.
So there are certain states where you know ahead of time who is going to win because they always vote for one particular party.
However, there are something called swing states as well.
A swing state, if you think of a swing, is something that goes back and forth.
And a swing state is a state that goes back and forth.
That means that it could vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate.
Sometimes they vote one way.
Sometimes they vote the other.
And overall, when you look at the people who live in the state, there's about an equal amount of Democrats versus Republicans.
In this election, there are thought to be seven swing states.
In the West, they are Arizona and Nevada.
In the South, they are North Carolina and Georgia.
And in the northern middle part of the country, they are Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
These are the states that actually matter because they are the ones who are going to determine the electoral college winner.
In 2020, Joe Biden won six of these seven swing states and whoever wins them in this upcoming election will be the president.
For that reason, the candidates always campaign in these states.
These are the states where the campaigns have rallies, where they are having events every day, where they're really trying to get people to vote for them.
In the states that are safe, like California, which is for sure going to vote for the Democratic candidate, no one campaigns here.
No one comes to California to campaign because it's already known who the state is going to vote for.
The swing states, however, they get a lot of people coming to campaign.
A lot of money gets spent on advertisements.
A lot of people are volunteering to try to help their particular candidate win and they pretty much get all of the attention.
So if you're interested in looking at polls and seeing who is ahead, who is more likely to win the presidency, those are the seven states that you want to look at.
Personally, I don't really look at polls.
They tend to be inaccurate.
They don't tend to be very accurate.
They tend to say one thing, but we really find out that the actual vote is different.
So instead, what you can do is you can look at voter registration.
Registration means people who are signing up to vote, new people who are signing up to vote.
And usually that gives you a better indication of who is going to win that state.
People who sign up to vote right before an election are the people who are most likely to vote.
And there's been a lot of people who have signed up recently.
For example, Taylor Swift did a post on Instagram and I think it was half a million people used her link to go to the site that allows people to register to vote.
So there have been a lot of people who have signed up recently.
Now in terms of electoral college vote number out of those swing states, the biggest state, the state that has the most electoral college votes out of those particular seven swing states is Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is the most important state in terms of who is going to win the election.
It is the state that both parties are fighting the most over.
In terms of just who has the most electoral college votes, that is my state, California.
California is the most populous state in the country.
And so we have the most electoral college votes.
The second state that has the most electoral college votes is Texas.
There has been something interesting occurring in Texas in the past couple of election cycles.
Barack Obama lost the state of Texas by 12%.
That's a really big loss.
That meant that the state really voted for the Republican candidate.
Hillary Clinton lost the state by 9%.
And in the last election, Joe Biden lost the state by 5 .5%.
It's unknown if Kamala Harris is going to keep this trend.
If Texas is going to become more towards becoming a swing state, it might.
That's the part that is generating a lot of excitement and confusion and worry in the United States right now, because Texas might become a swing state.
It might become one of those states that could possibly vote for a Democratic candidate or a Republican candidate.
We'll see what the results are after this election.
But the reason why it is exciting or worrying, depending on which party you belong to, is that Republicans cannot win the electoral college without Texas.
The math is impossible because Texas is such a big state and because it has so many electoral college votes.
Now, it's not guaranteed that Texas is going to continue to become less Republican because one of the other states that used to be a swing state is Florida.
It is the third most populous state in the United States.
So it has the third most electoral college votes.
And it used to be considered a swing state.
It used to be a state that was thought to determine the presidential election like Pennsylvania is now.
However, in the last couple of years, Florida has become more and more Republican.
Barack Obama won it twice.
He barely won it in 2012.
But then in 2016 and 2020, the state became more and more Republican.
And that's what I want to end with today.
What to look for on election night.
So if you are awake, if you're in the United States or in some other country and awake when the polls close here in the United States tomorrow.
If you want to focus on one thing when trying to determine who is going to win the presidential election, look at Florida.
Now, it pains me to say this, which means that I don't like saying this because I'm tired of looking at Florida on election night.
But Florida is extremely important.
Florida has a history of difficulty with their voting.
And they are the reason in 2000 that George Bush won the presidency, even though Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, won the popular vote.
And that was because there were issues with Florida's vote and with Florida's vote counting.
Florida has changed the way that they count votes because of all of those issues and they count their votes very quickly, much faster than other states.
If you remember the last election, it took a couple of days to determine who won because some states count their votes very slowly.
Florida, though, counts them very quickly.
Within two hours of the polls closing, you should have a good idea of who is going to win the state.
Now, this is nice because Florida is on the East Coast, so it is one of the first states to close their polls.
Two hours after the polls have closed.
If Kamala Harris is ahead, she's most likely going to win that state.
That would be a huge upset and she would most likely win the presidency.
If it is close after two hours, if after two hours they say that they can't determine who won the state, then it's probably still going to be Kamala Harris.
Remember, it was thought that she would lose Florida.
So if Florida is very, very close, that means she's doing better than expected.
She'll most likely win the other swing states and she most likely will be the next president.
If, however, she is losing Florida, if after two hours they say that she lost the state, then you have to focus on the other seven and see what their results are.
And we might know who won on election night or we might not.
Just like in 2020, it might take a couple of days for those other swing states to finish counting their votes, certifying their votes and saying who won.
I hope you found this episode interesting.
I hope you learned a little bit about the electoral college, why it was created, why it's controversial and what to look for on election night.
We went over a lot of vocabulary in this episode, so a reminder to check the description.
There you can find a vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I used in this episode.
You can take those words, you can start studying them and hopefully start using them yourself.
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