On Tuesday November 3rd 2020, Americans will vote for the next President of the USA, but the battle between the two candidates, President Trump and Vice-President Biden is fought particularly fiercely in the "swing" states, where there race is very close. The reason is that the Presidential election is an indirect election: voters choose an
Electoral College first, and then, the elected members of that
Electoral College vote for the President, so the popular vote does not always decide the President, but the number of "electoral votes" -a minimum of 270- that each candidate has won in each of the 50 states of the Union -the winner in each state carries all the votes from that constituency. Some states are clearly Republican, so they are called
"red states", basically, the Mid-West and the South, other states usually vote for the Democrats, they are called
"blue states", mainly on the West Coast and in New England, but there are
"purple states", which "swing" or change sides in sucessive elections, like Florida (29 electoral votes), Ohio (18 votes), Iowa (6 votes), and, in the last two elections, Pennsylvania (20 votes), and they become the real battleground for Presidential elections.
This article from the Los Angeles Times reports on the latest polls in the "battleground states" of the 2020 Presidential election. The vocabulary is rather technical, so, the reading is recommended for C1 students and above. You will come across words like: polls, battleground states, a tight [race], former, to butt [heads], to bar, blue states, red states, a high-profile [event], too-close-to-call [states], a flurry [of polls], backdrop, to trail, worrisome, key states, the industrial belt, an aberration, a realignment, [non-college-educated] working-class [white] voters, [Republican]-leaning [Ohio], on a knife's edge, a dead heat, [his] edge, coveted [Pennsylvania], a lead, likely [voters], survey, a split, to beat, to trend for [Trump], [to remain] close, a snapshot, pollsters, to flip [for Biden].
If you want to follow election polls, The Guardian Polls Tracker collects reliable national and state polls results in 8 swing states and gives you the average in the last 14 days, or you may check the Politico US Election Forcast, with charts, the latest news and a map of the "solid", "likely" and the "lean" states, together with the "toss-up" states, which are the most undecided.
