How to Talk about Elections in English

We’re back with another blog post, and this time it’s all about election-related English vocabulary with a focus on the U.S. elections. This blog post will help you in conversations with colleagues and friends alike. To achieve English fluency, it is essential to study English vocabulary. Learning how to have English conversations will give you a confidence boost, and will help you feel more at ease when at events with native English speakers.

Now let’s read the text below. I have highlighted the relevant vocabulary. Make sure you review the text more than once. For additional practice, watch news programming about the U.S. elections, documentaries related to the topic and read articles where you will certainly find a lot of the English vocabulary below again. Repetition is key for you to truly internalize the vocabulary.

Now let’s really get started:

So what are the requirements to become President of the United States? For a person to run for office, they need to be a natural born citizen (a citizen by birth), at least 35 years old and a U.S. resident for a minimum of 14 years.

There are two major political parties in the United States: the Republicans and the Democrats, also known as the Democratic and the Republican Party respectively. Before the presidential elections, there are always many different candidates campaigning around the country competing to win their party’s nomination. In caucuses, party members meet, discuss, and vote for the candidate they think would be the best to represent them in the general election. In primaries, party members vote in a state election for the candidate of their choice. 

The next step are national conventions held by the different parties to officially select a Presidential nominee. This is also when the official candidate announces their choice for Vice President. Throughout all this, the candidates for the two different major parties never stop campaigning. They usually hold campaign rallies where they try to appeal to their prospective voters. Their goal is to win as much of the general population’s support as possible. This point can be complicated by the fact that the U.S. Presidential elections are not decided by the majority vote, or popular vote as in most other democracies. They are decided in a different way. The U.S. electoral system uses an electoral college system. 

So how does this work? The different states in the U.S. have different amounts of electoral votes based on their population size, so a state like Texas has 38 electoral votes because lots of people live there, and a state like Montana has 3 electoral votes because its population density is very low. This number equals the total number of Senators in the Senate and Representatives in the House of Representatives in Congress, a two chamber legislative institution. Each state gets two Senators, so subtract that number from the total, and you will know how many Representatives serve in Congress representing that state. The total number of electors is 538. Each elector casts one vote after the general election. The candidate who gets 270 votes or more wins. The elections take place on the first Tuesday of November. 

So what happens when a candidate wins the majority of votes in a state even by only one vote? They win all the electoral votes in that state based on the winner-takes-all principle, so you can imagine winning Texas is very important while winning Montana is not that important. There are only two states that decide this by congressional district: Maine and Nebraska. In those states, it is possible to win, for example, one electoral college vote while your opponent (the candidate you are running against) might win the rest. It gets very interesting when we look at the phenomenon of swing states, battleground states, and purple states. These terms describe states where it is not clear whether they will go to the Democrats or the Republicans. Some important swing states are usually states like Pennsylvania, but this can vary because over the course of the four years between Presidential elections a lot can change demographically in a state and political alignments can shift. 

These trends are usually closely watched by campaign strategists and pollsters alike, and candidates might decide to travel to those swing states more than to other states. Closely watching these developments will also tell you a lot about a candidate’s platform and then a new President’s policy agenda since they will have to think about certain constituencies to get re-elected after four years, if it is their first term (in office). U.S. Presidents can only serve two terms. There is a constitutional term limit, so a President’s second term often sees a less restrained policy agenda by domestic concerns. 

Another important factor is voter turnout. It is important for a candidate to make sure that the people who support them actually turn out to vote, while the people who would never cast their ballot for them stay home. For the Republican Party, this has become increasingly important because the United States has been becoming more and more diverse. The Republicans draw most of their support from older, white voters while the Democrats have diversified their voter base. For example, the vast majority of African-Americans, in fact over 90%, usually cast their vote for the Democrats. For Republicans, the diversification of the U.S. population has become an issue that their campaign strategists are very much aware of. They know that they benefit from a lower voter turnout while the Democrats try to make sure that as many eligible voters as possible register to vote and then actually vote.

After the general elections, the government will launch a transition of power if the President-Elect is not the incumbent. This transition usually starts only days after the official announcement of the winner and takes until January 20th when the newly elected President and Vice President are then inaugurated on January 20th.

Next time, I will walk you through how to talk about election results while they are coming in usually during the night of and days after. We will look at language used to describe who currently has more votes in a state and at language used to comment on and analyze election results.

For now, have fun with today’s blog post, and as always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.