Daily Dose of English 158
The US Election
Daily Dose of English 158
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about the United States presidential election, or the US election, because today, when this episode is coming out, is September the 5th, which is two months before the actual election day, which is November 5th, 2024. So I thought it'd be sort of fun to lay the groundwork, so to speak, so to give you a general overview on what U.S. politics are sort of like and what the election season is like in sort of a broad overview. I am not an expert in this. I do not know everything. I'm only going to cover what I know as sort of just a regular person. And so it's a little bit more focused on things that everybody generally knows, everybody might think about. But if you want a lot more detail and nuance, definitely look up some articles or videos or things from other people who know a lot more than I do. Um, but let's just jump into it and talk a bit about, um, what's happening. And let's also hope that my power stays on because yesterday I tried to record this episode and I was almost done. I think I had like a minute left or something and then all my power went out and I didn't really want to restart. So we're doing it again today. But yeah. So So the presidential election in the U.S. takes place every four years and they're on multiples of four starting from actually zero conveniently. So 2000, 2004, 2008, 12, 16, 20 and this year is 2024 is always an election year. A US president can serve up to eight years. So if you get elected, you get one term of four years, and then you can run again, and you can potentially have up to eight years in office. For example, Obama was elected twice. He had eight full years. Trump won in 2016 and then lost in 2020 to Biden, but he hasn't served eight years, which is why he's eligible to run again this year. But then he won't be able to run again even if he does win. So that would be his final term. what it's i'm not necessarily going to say whether it's a good or bad thing it's it's probably a negative thing but most people only really think about the presidential election the president is the most important uh figure in politics kind of by far and a lot of people are not super engaged with who more local um politicians are, despite them actually having a lot more influence on individual states. So the US is a republic, which means that there are individual states that have a lot of power over their state. And if you go to different states in the US, there are laws that are totally different. There's things that you can do in some states that you just cannot do in other states. A pretty good example is marijuana, which we've talked about before. In some states, it's totally legal. You can buy, sell it. It's taxed, but it's legal. But in some states, it's totally illegal and you can go to prison for that, which is a very big difference in a single country. But, and those rules are generally made by states, not by the federal government or the big, the entire country's government, which is the federal government. But, It would be better if everybody was a little more in tune with their local elections. However, another sort of, I guess, quirk of the US elections is that there are very strong party divisions. And so there are two different parties in the US, which are the red and blue, or Republican and Democrat, or right and left. Those are pretty much the only parties that matter. I honestly don't think that other parties have won. That was not the right word. Have won. Not be totally true. I'm not actually positive maybe like the first year, but it's always at least nowadays It's always about the Republican the Republicans and Democrats. There is no other Relevant parties there are legally like you can run there's like a I don't know a green party or something I don't actually know what there are they're just completely off the list basically And so that actually means that there's a lot of Oh, and then the other thing is that we use something called the Electoral College, which is basically a... How do I explain this? So there are obviously like 350 million people in the US that vote, or actually not that many that vote. That's how many people there are. That's how many people could vote. A lot fewer people do vote, but they don't actually vote directly towards the president. That's called the popular vote. That's just the raw, what percentage of the people that voted, voted for this person. That's called the popular vote. But then what actually happens is that the votes per state are counted, and then each state gets a certain number of what are called electoral votes. So these electoral votes are part of the Electoral College, and that is actually what goes to the people. So you see the number of electoral votes. And each state is worth a different number related to its population. The lowest number I think is three. The smallest states have three votes, or smallest in population. They're actually pretty large states, but they're small in people amount. So states like the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming have only a couple of votes, because hardly anybody lives there, only a few hundred thousand. But then states like New York and California, which are massive, they have tons of people, have way, way more. California has the most with 55, and then New York, I think, has like 29. I'm not totally positive on the numbers, but One of the big complaints from people, especially people that live in these bigger states, is that the ratio of electoral votes to actual inhabitants is wrong. It means that the people that live in smaller states actually have slightly more power. Right. So for example, um, let's just look at Wyoming has three. No, no, no. Idaho has four, four votes. That's better. And Oregon where I'm from has seven or eight depending on the year. I think it has, um, uh, seven, but let's say it's about double. So, but if we look at the population of Oregon, population of Oregon is 4.2 million. And so then what we'd expect is the population of Idaho to be 2.1 million. However, the population of Idaho is actually a little bit lower. It's at 1.9 million. So it's less than half of the population with double the vote. So it's a slight, discrepancy and so if you live in Idaho you actually have a slightly more impactful vote than in Oregon and then it's even worse for a state like California which should have way more than it actually does even though it's already a ton and yada yada yada because the other thing is that states Many states are always the same, they always vote the same. So using California as an example, it always votes blue, it always votes for the Democrat candidate. Oregon as well, and there's a ton of these states that always vote for a specific candidate. Texas is always red, Louisiana always red, Idaho actually is always red. Like there's these specific states that are always red, the Republican states. And these tend to be smaller, which also gives an edge to more rural voters, despite there being more urban voters, so more people in cities than in the countryside. And so this is another complaint about the Electoral College, that it's not really super balanced. And it also puts a lot of focus on the states that do actually change. There is a small list of states that go back and forth between voting for the Democrats or the Republicans, depending on the year. They have close enough to a 50-50 split of voters, where some years they can go blue, some years they can go red. These are called swing states and this ends up being the focus of so much of political campaigns because For example, the Democrat party can basically be sure that they're going to get Oregon, Washington, California, New York, all those states. So they don't really need to focus very much of their energy into converting those voters. And so a lot of the energy and focus is on these swing states. So states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, because these states you could win over and they're not a sure thing. And so this creates another sort of weird incentive towards doing something, a weird incentive towards focusing on these states that actually aren't the majority, right? And so these states have a very small percentage of the US population, but they matter way more in the election. And so when you're watching the election, if you do, there's gonna be things that just aren't a surprise. They count the votes, it's the same, it hasn't changed. But then some, you'll probably hear them talking about swing states and waiting until these come in, because these are the important states for voting. And I believe that Pennsylvania is one of the most important ones, Pennsylvania and Georgia, because they're pretty big in terms of the number of votes that you get. By the way, the actual electoral votes are 538 and you need at least 270 to win the election. And yeah, that's sort of it. We're already at 11-ish minutes in. I'm not really sure exactly what else I wanna add. I guess that the main thing is to, yeah, I'll just talk a little bit more. Um, if you're interested, definitely follow some stuff. It's going to be a very interesting election because the world is in some turmoil. You might, you might say there's a lot of stuff happening in the world, a lot of instability in, um, whether it's elections or the economy. And so a lot of people think that there's going to be a change, right? People are looking, people are looking for change rather. People want something to be different because real people are feeling it. You can tell when you look at your bank account or your expenses every month going, wow, things are getting more expensive for me. Or rent is a huge problem in lots of the world, especially in cities in the U.S. It's very, very expensive. Um, and so people are not super happy with the current president, uh, Joe Biden. However, he's not running. He decided that he's too old to run or probably his team did because he's fricking ancient. He's so old. Um, but the, the new democratic, um, uh, What's the, what's the word? Uh, the new democratic, the people that are running, I don't know. Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz. I forget his first name, but I knew his last name is Waltz. Um, what's his name? I think it's Tim. Um, yeah, Tim Waltz. Okay. I'm right versus, um, Donald Trump and JD Vance. And things look very, very close right now. Nobody is able to say, yeah, we're pretty sure XYZ is going to win. It's not a super clear thing, because Trump has a lot of support being what's called an incumbent, you might hear. Is that true? Let me double check that meaning, because I've never actually checked it. I'm pretty sure. Incumbent is, oh no, it's okay, I'm thinking of it as the opposite. So the incumbent is the current person in power, right? This is a terrible definition. The person who has a particular, yeah, okay. So who has or had, okay, dictionary.cambridge.org is not being very helpful. But yeah, the incumbent is the person that's currently in power. Donald Trump is the not incumbent whatever it is like the person coming in that's a different party. There's a lot of support there he's Talking directly to a lot of the rural voters. Like I said about that have a little bit more power in the Electoral College and He is promising big changes and that sort of thing. It is very unlikely that that's actually true and especially looking at there was this thing that came out called Project 2025, not written by Trump, but written by people right in his sort of direct sphere of influence that try to influence him, which talks about a lot of pretty terrible things that they want to do in the US, which is very unsettling, honestly. If you look at it, there's just a lot of things that are sort of gross and bad, a lot of anti-abortion rights, lots of focus on big business, having more power, that sort of thing. And then on the other side, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I'm actually a very big fan of especially Tim Walz. Kamala Harris is, she's a good speaker. She's seems totally fine, but she's definitely a bit politician-y. Very feels like a person trying to be a politician. But Tim Walz is really interesting because he's, I've been the governor of Minnesota, and he's done very well there. He's really just like, he just feels like a regular person. He's good at talking sort of about regular person issues. doesn't make very much money. He doesn't own a ton of stock. He's not super rich. He's posted videos about fixing his car. He just feels like a normal dude. He feels like a guy. but he also really understands sort of how to do things well. His management of Minnesota has been very good. People have been very happy with the progress that's been made. Like he actually does stuff. And yeah, he just is a, he sort of came out of nowhere. A lot of people didn't know who he was. He was in the army and there's just a lot of really good stuff about Tim Waltz. So, He's actually the main person that I'm excited about in the presidential race. Other than that, I'm pretty... It's just such a hard thing to care about because it's so dramatized and whatnot. But yeah, that's sort of what I'm looking at, is hoping that he gets a little bit more time because he's also... Like I don't know he just has a very different vibe to him that feels not icky I guess you could say right if you if you listen to Trump or JD Vance or even Kamala Harris Joe Biden speak it's just feel so bland and presidential and like, ugh. But he feels a lot more real, like Bernie Sanders a few years ago was a lot more talking to people, regular people like that vote and not that aren't super duper wealthy. So, yeah. And the last thing that I wanna say personally that I'm looking at is actually not the president, but somebody that was appointed by Joe Biden for the Federal Trade Commission that controls a lot of, basically upholding laws for companies. And this is Lena Kahn. She has been doing a fantastic job keeping the companies in check, the big companies, and making sure that they're not doing things that are illegal, that are creating more monopolies. However, all the people that are really rich don't like her because she's making it harder to be even richer. And so that's like one of the things that I'm really looking for is for her to stay around because she's been doing an excellent job. However, if Trump gets elected, she's almost guaranteed to be fired, almost probably like 100%, I would say. And some people think that Kamala might also because some of Kamala's donors don't like her, don't like Lena Khan as well. But I'm really, really hopeful that she sticks around because she's been actually doing a fantastic job making sure that like Google just got declared a monopoly by a judge and that was sort of through that whole thing. There's been really good stuff happening and that's actually pretty important globally because so many of the biggest companies in the world are American and so they have to bend to the Federal Trade Commission, sort of like when the EU does something and says, hey, you got to make this better for consumers. Apple goes, no, we don't want to. No, no, no. You can't make us. Then they make them do it. Then they do it. Everybody likes it. And they also do it in the US. So it's this. domino effect of good regulation on these massive corporations to say, make this better for the people. And they'll complain, they'll drag their feet, but if somebody like Lena Kahn is there to make them do it, it ends up being way better for all of us who get better stuff at better prices and there's more competition in the market. Yeah, this has been another 20-minute episode. I'm going to end it here now, but we'll check back in either next month just to see where things are. Probably, actually, I'll make an episode on Election Day, which will be before the election. I'm not exactly sure how this is going to work, but yeah. Anyways, I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. And if you have a second, I'd love to hear your thoughts on either your country's election or the U.S. 's down below. But I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one.
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