Understanding the US Elections

Trying to understand the American presidential elections? There's more to it than just Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Confused about electoral colleges, super delegates, polls, incumbents, and candidates? Let me explain it for you! In this video, I'll teach you the vocabulary, definitions, and expressions you need to know to follow the US elections. You'll learn how the elections work, what the electoral college is, and who is involved in presidential elections. This information is very important for anyone living in the United States and for those who want to follow the US elections and world politics. I'll answer the questions: What is a primary? What is a caucus? What is the electoral college? What is a delegate, and what is a super-delegate? How do nominees become candidates? What is a pundit? What are swing voters? What is a presidential platform? After you've watched the video, take the quiz to test your knowledge of the American voting system! http://www.engvid.com/understanding-the-2016-us-elections/

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. Welcome back to www.engvid.com. I'm Adam. Today we're going to talk about "The American Election". Now, if you live anywhere in the world, it's very hard to escape hearing about what's going on in America. The elections are coming up, everybody's talking about it. They're using a lot of new words, a lot of complicated words that you might not be familiar with, so we're going to talk about this. I'll explain to you a little bit how it works. I'll explain to you some of the words you're going to hear commonly. And keep in mind that although it's a bit more for advanced students because I have a lot to say about all this, there's a lot of new information here, but even if you're a beginner, lots of new words, lots of good words that are everyday words. If you watch CNN ever, you're going to hear some of these words because CNN loves to talk about the election. Okay? So let's get into some of this, and we'll see where we go.

First of all we're going to start with the two parties. Okay? So, America is essentially a two-party system. You have the Republicans and you have the Democrats. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't other parties. In fact, there are many parties in America, but usually they don't get many votes, and maybe even... Not even 1% of the total vote for all the little parties. Now, you can also have a third-party candidate, meaning somebody who wants to run by him or herself with his or her own money. Okay? Because the Republicans and the Democrats give money to their candidates to run a campaign. I'm going to go over all these words, so not to worry.

So, first let's start with the Republicans. Okay? They're sometimes called the GOP. You're going to hear this often. This is just a nickname, it means "Grand Old Party." I should make this a little bit bigger. Grand Old Party. It's just a nickname given to them a long, long time ago. In fact, both of these parties are over 150 years old, and they have won every election since way back when. And what they do is they often switch. Sometimes they'll go on a streak, like the Democrats will win a bunch of elections, the Republicans will win a bunch of elections. Sometimes they'll switch back and forth every election. It depends on the season, depends on the mindset of Americans. Okay? So here we have the two Democrats.

Now, the campaign, the... The attempt to run for office... Okay? So, "running for office" means trying to become president. So what happens is they start their campaign. A "campaign" is an organized effort to reach a goal. Okay? You have an advertisement campaign, you have a sales campaign. It's basically something organized with a target to reach by the end of it. In this case, the target is the presidency of the United States. So, this campaign usually starts well over a year before the actual election.

Before they can vote for a president, each party must present a candidate. A "candidate" is the person that the American people will vote for in November, Democrat or Republican. But before you have a candidate for each party, each party has nominees. A "nominee" is the potential candidate, people who are chosen to try to become the candidate. You could have three, four, five, 15. It doesn't matter. Whoever wants to try to be president can try.

Now, what they do, all these nominees, they go all over the country and they try to win delegates. I'll explain "delegates" in a second. So what they're trying to do is become the candidate for their party, they go around, they have a campaign, they give speeches, they put TV and radio advertisements, they do all kinds of things so the people will vote for them. Okay? Now, what they do is they go to each state and they have a primary or a caucus.

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