Ripped From the Headlines! | Free Pronunciation and Vocabulary Lesson

In this lesson, we’ll use an article about the upcoming election in the US to study pronunciation and learn relevant vocabulary. 

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Video Transcript:

Today, we’re studying English with news while we look at an article about the upcoming election in the United States.

I’m Rachel and I’ve been teaching the English language to non-native speakers of English for over 15 years. Check out Rachelsenglish.com/free to get a free course on Mastering the American Accent.

The headline: Where Harris has gained and lost support compared with Biden.

This is from The New York Times and it published late last week when Kamala Harris became her party’s nominee, she inherited a democratic Coalition in shambles.

Okay, a couple great vocabulary words there. First, ‘in shambles’. This means something that’s become a disaster, it’s just fallen apart. So the Democratic party, it’s saying was in shambles. Why was the Democratic party in shambles? Because there wasn’t full support for President Biden running for a second term. After a tornado goes through a town, it could leave the town in shambles.

Coalition, this means alliance. A group of people coming together under a common goal. In this case, the Democratic party.

Let’s look at the pronunciation of the word ‘nominee’.

It has last syllable stress. Any word that ends in ee has last syllable stress. Just like the word ‘absentee’, which is another election word ‘absentee ballot’ is when you can’t go vote in person so you send in an absentee ballot instead. Absentee, nominee. Last syllable stress.

As she wraps up her party’s convention one month later, she’s well on her way towards stitching it back together.

Stitching it back together. Think of two pieces of fabric torn apart coming back together and stitching. So, they’re using a metaphor here. She’s taking the shambles of the democratic party and she’s stitching the party back together.

In this month’s New York Times Sienna College Battleground polls, she led Donald J. Trump by two percentage points across the seven states likeliest to decide the presidency, compared with Mr. Trump’s five-point lead in May.

What does battleground mean? In the United States we vote with something called an electoral college, there’s a lot to say about it. It can be a little confusing, I’m actually going to work on another video on that topic that will publish before the election, but for now let’s just say that in certain states, your vote matters more because it’s a Battleground state. That means that it’s not clear ahead of time which presidential candidate will win that State’s Electoral College votes because the people that live within that state are pretty evenly split about which candidate they like.

It’s then more important for the candidates to really hit these Battleground States, that’s where the votes are really going to count that can change the election results.

It’s an enormous shift but Vice President Harris didn’t improve equally among all demographic groups.

An enormous shift, a huge change. What does the word demographic mean?

This is how we talk about people based on something like race, religion, age, income level, where they live, these kind of statistics about people. And I don’t know if it’s this way in your country but in our country we love to talk about the demographics of voters, the type of person who typically votes for which candidate.

Instead she made big gains on among young non-white and female voters and made relatively few or no gains among older voters and white men.

So here we’ve got some words defining people by their demographic. We’ve got young, we’ve got older, we’ve got non-white female, male white men.

I just realized I should comment a little bit on the nominees. So, in the United States to be your party’s nominee, you run in a primary, and whoever wins gets to be the party’s nominee that happened for Donald Trump. Now usually, with a president who’s up for a second term nobody runs against that person. That person is the presumptive nominee. Now, in this case that was Biden, the current president but he stepped down about a month ago. So that opened the door for who’s next. Kamala Harris quickly stepped up and won support of the party so now she is the party’s nominee.

So, this article is looking at different groups of people, of voters and saying compared to May, when Biden was the nominee, where has Kamala gotten more people to say yes I like the Democrats, and where has Kamala gotten less people to say yes, I like the Democrats.

So we have several demographics here. People with an income less than $25,000 a year, non-white voters under the age of 45. The number one place where Harris made gains unsurprisingly, is among people who said they have a somewhat unfavorable view of Trump. So they don’t really like him much but some of them were still willing to vote for him because they disliked Biden. The issue in the Democratic party is that Biden was too old and not mentally sharp. Among this group, the Republican candidate Trump still won back in May with 11 points but now compared to Harris, the Democratic candidate wins by 36 points. A huge change of 47 points. This says 46 but I believe that should be 47. So it looks like people who had a somewhat unfavorable view of Trump were still willing to vote for him over Biden. But when given a different option, they’re going for it.

By the way, n here is the sample size. The number of people in this category or demographic who answered the question: Are you more likely to vote for the Democrat or the Republican in the general election.

People whose income is less than $25,000 a year. Biden versus Trump, they were more likely to vote for Biden but now that Harris is the option they’re much more likely to vote for the Democrat. She gained 20 points here, she gained 17 points for non-white voters under the age of 45.

Live in a city. With demographics, people often talk about urban versus rural. People who live in cities around a lot of people versus people who don’t. I know both of those words can be tricky to pronounce, rural. I actually have a video on how to pronounce that word so you can search for it on YouTube.

But in this case, live in a city this is referring to urban voters. So Kamala has gained more favor with voters who live in a city who are urban.

Women under the age of 45, she’s gained ground there.

A regular TikTok user. Honestly, I have not ever seen demographics that broke people out based on social media use, but here it is. Kamala has gained ground with regular TikTok users.

People who label themselves as somewhat liberal, they’re more in favor of electing Kamala than they were of electing Biden.

Self-identified moderate. So this is somebody who said says: I feel like I’m more middle of the road. I’m not super liberal, I’m not super conservative, I’m in the middle, I’m a Centrist, I’m middle of the road when it comes to politics and my views. I’m moderate. Kamala gained ground with moderates also non-white other in this case, specifically not Black, not Hispanic, but someone who would identify themselves not as being white, she has gained also with that demographic.

If you draw up a list of President Biden challenges this cycle, you could probably find a demographic group corresponding to each one on this list of Mrs. Harris’s biggest gains.

Draw up a list. Draw up is simply means to make in this case. To make a list. You might also use this phrasal verb with proposal. We’re going to draw up a proposal and we’ll get it to you by Friday. This cycle, that refers to this election cycle. Not the one four years ago when he won but this cycle, this election. And so now we go into a lot of different words on how media and other people may divide people into groups.

There’s young non-white and low-turnout voters. What is a low-turnout voter? This is a group of people that is not very likely to vote, even though they’re of the age where they can vote in the United States, and the places they tend to live, there’s the lowest income voters who suffered through rising prices, there’s even the TikTok users immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era.

Immersed in the bad vibes. When you’re immersed in something, it means you’re totally underwater in it, so if you’re going to immerse a ball in water you’re going to push it down so it doesn’t float. But in this case you can be immersed in something, in a feeling, in an environment. And here they’re immersed in the bad vibes of the Biden era.

The bad vibes of the Biden era, what does that even mean? Bad vibes is a way to describe when you don’t like something. It’s not necessarily specific, it just sort of means the whole thing. I don’t like the whole thing, there’s just bad vibes all about it. So on TikTok, there was a lot of bad vibes about President Biden I’m not actually on TikTok so I didn’t know that. My demographic, I guess I’m just a little too old.

The Muslim and Arab voters angry about the war on Gaza don’t make the list but only because of their small sample size, so there were just 55 respondents in August, so I guess that sample size was too small to include here. They would have been number one on the list with a net swing of 49 points toward Miss Harris.

To swing simply means to go in the other direction, the support is swinging towards Harris.

The top of the list however is led by an entirely different group. Those with a somewhat unfavorable view of trump in an extraordinary measure of Mr. Biden’s weakness, Mr. Trump actually led voters who had a somewhat unfavorable view of him back in May.

Wow. So what that saying is people who have an unfavorable view of Trump actually kind of still wanted to vote for Trump over Biden, but a lot of them now that Harris is their option are saying yep, I’m going to vote for Harris.

Now, Miss Harris has a wide lead among this group at least for the moment. And there’s one group that reveals Miss Harris’s distinctive mark on the race: women.

Distinctive mark, this means a noticeable impact. It’s clear to see that Kamala Harris has made a difference here.

She didn’t simply make gains among young and non-white voters, she made outsize gains among young women.

Outsize means more than what you would see in other groups. More than what you see in other ratios. Her gains there were even bigger.

Overall, Miss Harris has gained 11 points compared with Mr. Biden among women while she improved just three points among men. The shift among women is broad and includes nearly every demographic group including older white women and white women without a college degree.

So again, different ways we separate people. Older versus younger, has a college degree versus doesn’t have a college degree.

On the other end of the spectrum, the top 10 groups where Miss Harris didn’t gain much support looks very different.

A spectrum is the entire range of something. So they’re talking about the spectrum of demographics. On one end where she made gains is pretty different from the other end where she didn’t make gains or made loses.

People who identify as somewhat conservative were maybe more likely to vote for Biden than they are now for Harris. Because at this point 10% more would vote for the Republican candidate than for the Democratic candidate compared to when asked in May.

Those who are very conservative also less likely to vote for Kamala Harris than would have voted for Biden. More likely now to vote for former president Trump.

Let’s skip down to number six, rarely uses social media. Again, this is the first time I’ve seen people broken out into social media use in something like this. Maybe it’s been happening for several election cycles but it’s the first time I’ve seen it.

So she made a little gain. She gained a little ground over Biden from that demographic.

Rural, again that tricky word, opposite of urban, rural. She made a small gain among rural voters.

Number seven, honestly I’m surprised by that. When they asked people who voted for Trump in 2020 who they would vote for now. In May, 93% said I will vote for Trump, but now in August, 91% said they would vote for Trump. So Kamala gained a little bit from that group of people.

Many of the groups sticking by Mr. Trump are those where no Democrat can realistically make big gains like Republicans, Trump 2020 voters, self-described “very conservative” voters and those with a very favorable view of Mr. Trump. I’m going to skip ahead here a bit.

One group that stands out for not being a relative strength for Miss Harris: non-white voters over 45. Mr. Biden held his own among these voters and still held around 70% of their votes in our last round of polls. But perhaps the most telling area of weakness of all for Miss Harris is among white men. Although she made outsize gains among women and non-white voters, white men barely budged it all.

There’s that word again, outsize. She made outsized gains even bigger than expected, bigger than compared to other demographic groups.

And white men over 65, a level of grand granularity not included in the table actually shifted 6 points toward Mr. Trump.

What does the word granularity mean?

A level of granularity, when you get granular. That means they’re going smaller and smaller to study something. So this table that we saw didn’t have all of the granularity from the study. In other words it had bigger groups of demographics but not like the really small ones, like the one here. It just didn’t have that level of granularity in this publication of the results.

There are so many ways we divide people. White, non-white, older, younger, conservative, moderate, liberal, and honestly I feel like elections make those differences feel so important. I’m lucky enough in Philadelphia to live in a very diverse area politically. Right in my little neighborhoods, there are people of all different views. And I’ve got to say that’s really challenged me because for me it’s more comfortable to just hang out with people that think like me. But I’ve definitely come to realize that that’s not the right way to live our lives because that’s not really the country that I want. I do want a country where we’re talking about our differences with each other.

And as I read articles like this I think about how much these divisions, these demographic divisions play a part in our lives because of what we’re told but what it comes down to is just person-to-person communication and care. And that’s one thing that I’ve really learned from being an English teacher from teaching non-native English speakers is I’ve learned that there’s so much about a person that I don’t know when I first meet them and everybody has an interesting story even if demographically they seem really different. There is always a way to connect with somebody.

So to end, I’m just going to say no matter how you get categorized or how you categorize yourself, I value you. Thank you for watching this video, I love so much being your English teacher. Please check out this video and be sure to subscribe with notifications on so you never miss another lesson. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.