Shadowing Practice: How Democrats swept the midterms - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Welcome to Vox Conversations.

I'm Sean Ramos from Vox.

I co -host our daily news show

Today Explained, and I'm joined by Vox's Ested Herndon, who hosts America Actually and is also on CNN all the time.

Ested, how blue was the wave?

Was it a blue nami?

Was it a blue sky, maybe?

What do you think?

I like the idea of blue sky, but I'll go with blue nami.

I mean, I think that we were first talking about whether wave or trickle,

and early in the night it became pretty clear that this would be a resounding resolve for Democrats.

And I think it only got more true as the night went on.

I mean, at this point, we're still looking at a Senate race in Mississippi, which I think no one would have expected coming into the night.

So, you know, all of that evidence really adds up to the best night that

Democrats could have hoped for.

And more importantly, I think a resounding rejection of this administration from the American public.

You've been talking about these midterms for a very long time.

Too long of a time.

I'm glad that we can now turn the page.

We'll turn the page tomorrow, but today we have to talk about all the races.

Which were the biggest wins?

Which were your favorites since you were watching so many of them?

Yeah, I mean, I think we can go

House results and some of the Senate results.

I mean, if I think about some of the ones that surprised me the most, I'll start with South Carolina,

where Darlene Graham, the Republican there, was ousted.

And you actually had this happen to a number of the Trump pick

Senate candidates, Kim Paxton obviously getting ousted in the Texas Senate race by James Taurico.

I think those and the margin of victories, I think the scope of victories that

Democrats had in the Senate are obviously the big takeaway of the night.

The wins in Kansas, wins in Iowa, even the margin for Angie Nixon in Florida,

all of that points to something that was happening across demographics, across the country.

I was looking at the New York Times data around demographic shifts from 2024.

And it had literally every demographic moving to the left based on the 2024 election.

And I think it finally put an end to some of the things

we have heard about 2024 being some permanent shift in working class, multiracial coalitions.

That wasn't really showing up in the data and our reporting this year.

And then that really came out in the results.

We should think of these communities as swinging, as a pendulum between parties rather than as firmly housed in either one.

You were talking briefly about margins.

Tell me more about some of the margins that that blew your mind.

Well, I think I am someone who, like, is actually a little down on the margin top because a win's a win.

I think if in South Carolina you win by one point, that feels like 30.

If you win, if you get a call in Georgia at 9 p .m like John Ossoff got, that's a blowout victory.

But I think there'll be some finding, particularly as we look ahead to the 2028 race, about some of the margins you saw in Senate races.

You have Abdul El -Sayed coming in at around five or six points.

That might be an underperformance for what we expect from a Democratic from this

Democratic environment largely.

But I think that's somebody who necessarily won't care about that stuff.

I think as we've been tracking the primary, it's been really clear that some of what folks were voting for was not just to change,

not just a certain candidate running against

Republicans, but they were backing a primary candidate to also change their own party.

And so some of that comes with electoral penalties, maybe a point here or there.

But I think that's a penalty

Democrats are willing to take to send someone like an El -Sayed to the Senate.

And so I think you can look at the margins and and kind of cherry pick here or there.

But in a wave of this type, I think there's universal results.

And I think that really speaks to some of the issues

that were really making up this sort of populist backlash of affordability.

You have A .I.

And I think that those things really drove

Democrats to really have a bottom versus top election in the ways that they wanted rather than right versus left.

I do want to talk about the issues momentarily, but I still want to focus on the Democrats for a second here,

because this did really feel like a referendum on our present politics, on our president, more so than, well, the country really loves Democrats now.

But did you see any particular races, be it the House, Senate, gubernatorial, whatever it may have been,

that suggested like, wow, Democrats really do have some solid footing here?

I mean, I think that for one, you know, midterms are not going to resolve the kind of party leader question that

Democrats had coming out of 2024.

The reason why there is a kind of pick anything, pick your own flavor landscape is because that's what these elections are.

Republicans have a centralized leader.

And that was who this election was about.

It was about a relationship to Donald Trump.

But certainly I think there's a lot of fresh faces from Democrats or fresh messages that certainly had a good night.

I'm thinking about Taurico and Ossoff in Texas and Georgia.

really leaned into that corruption message.

We saw that really be successful.

Again, I've talked about candidates who backed a data center moratorium.

Will Lawrence won in Michigan.

That's someone we talked to.

I think those candidates have a message that you can point to as successful.

And so you can have different pieces of the Democratic message

that certainly have a lot more electoral backing today than they did two days ago.

But I don't think it fully, I think I will be wary about fully extrapolating the electoral result to 2028,

because as we saw when Democrats performed fairly well in 2022,

they're usually different populations who come out in big margins for presidential versus midterms.

And specifically, Donald Trump has shown himself to be better at marginal voters, folks who come out infrequently,

rather than he is at folks who are more tuned into politics, more likely to come out in the midterm election.

And so I think that, like, although there are a lot of encouraging signs for Democrats,

that certainly does not mean they're about to cakewalk to the White House in 2028.

But at the same time, I think there's a lot of seeds of a message that will get them closer,

I think, to a more big tent, a party unifying theme that they weren't at maybe three, four months ago.

We spent a lot of time talking about redistricting, gerrymandering, this war for every last seat that was going on in the months before this election.

And then ultimately last night, it felt like it didn't matter that much.

I mean, why didn't that pan out for the Republicans?

Well, I would say a couple of things.

One, it still matters because the fact that we have these gerrymander maps means that we could see that if it was,

you know, if we got a 13, 14 point Democrats win in terms of popular vote,

as we might as we're as the kind of numbers are pointing to now, their margins could have been even bigger.

So, like, I think we should also say it still has an effect, even though Democrats were able to overcome some of those gerrymanders.

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But you're right.

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Democrats won several districts that were specifically drawn for Republicans to win in Florida, in North Carolina, in Texas, in Alabama.

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And so these have give them an opportunity, I think, to kind of lean in to nonpartisan gerrymanders.

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But more than that, to actually answer your question, I think it actually shows how

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Trump's rigging of the game caused an electoral backlash.

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I mean, I think we can't overstate

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that he tried to win these midterms months ago when he was trying to redraw these maps in Republican favor.

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He tried to win them two months ago when he was leaning into voter intimidation and state voter roll purchase.

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Like, he has taken the anti -democratic option at every turn here, and we've seen people actually respond to that.

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The reason why Mississippi is so close right now is because of a huge kind of turnout from black voters down there.

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The reason why they were able to overcome a gerrymander written

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to take out a black member of Congress in Alabama is because that community stepped up.

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And so I think that we're seeing a kind of electorate

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that really did not like the anti -Democratic lower D games that

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Republicans were playing here.

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And they saw folks really come out to stand up on that front.

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And I got to say, I find that a little heartening.

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I think that we sometimes assume in political journalism that these rules and these kind of structures cannot be overcome.

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But as we travel and talk to people, that's not something that they want to see.

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They want to see competitive districts.

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They want to see incentives for bipartisanship and compromise.

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Those rules have been written so that elected officials have to think about that less and less.

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And I think in the results yesterday, we see that that's not matching up with the public.

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OK, so you wouldn't say, you know, the gerrymandering didn't work.

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You would just say that the turnout, you know, overwhelmed it.

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You know, so they are.

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Yeah.

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Trumped it is a better way to say it.

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But what about the money?

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Because that's the other thing people were really worried about.

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I mean, how much money Elon Musk was pouring into Texas?

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Did political spending not ultimately matter in the most expensive election we've ever had?

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Yeah, we really saw that money flop, I would say, largely.

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Elon Musk poured millions into specifically that Texas race.

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You had the GOP have a huge spending advantage.

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We covered this, almost $500 million that they were pouring into races across the country.

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And it was around a couple issues.

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They tried to kind of wage this tech war

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and support candidates who were backing less regulation on crypto or less regulation on prediction markets.

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And I would say you also had to really lean into the kind of culture war, right?

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Like all of those ads were about Tau Frico.

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They were about masculinity.

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They were about kind of causing and stoking trans panic.

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And we haven't really seen that really move people in maybe the ways it did three, four years ago.

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I think there was a projection that some of this like.

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anti -wokeness message was forever resonant with the public.

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And I just don't think that's true.

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If anything, I think we actually saw people responding to Donald Trump's attacks on DEI.

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We saw people responding to Donald Trump's Republican attacks on trans people.

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And so I think that what they were using the money on was not a message that was resonant to people.

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And to your point, no amount of that spending was really able to overcome the things that people already knew.

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They knew they had less money in their pocket.

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They knew that gas prices were higher.

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And that's where the head was in the ballot box.

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Yeah, let's finally talk about those issues.

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I mean, you've mentioned a bunch of them.

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I like to think about the eyes, Iran, inflation, Israel, ICE, but there's also the AI of it all, as you've said.

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So did any of them resonate more than others?

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Was it all of them?

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What?

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It's kind of hard to separate because I think they're intertwined, but I would say it's all of them.

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I mean, I would start with affordability as the macro category that probably includes prices and inflation.

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And that really has been the Democrats' calling card throughout the year.

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Now, I think it's important to say that's not where Democrats started.

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I mean, even when Donald Trump announced his tariffs last summer,

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there was a lot of Democrats who were hemming and hawing about whether that should be something that they pushed back against.

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Really, the Democrats embraced that message in full after Mamdani's win in New York in 2025.

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And that worked for them.

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It actually repositioned the party from the bigger culture war focus of three, four years ago, back to things that mattered most to people.

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And we saw that intertwined with some other policy issues to corruption, which we found, which we talked about during a trip to Virginia,

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was really intertwined with affordability.

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It wasn't just that Donald Trump was kind of conducting an open grift.

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It was that he was doing it as things were becoming more unaffordable for you.

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And so those things were kind of working in tandem.

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And we saw candidates really lean into that corruption message with success.

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But I also think specifically when we look at Trump's collapse among

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Latino voters, we know that the deportations and the overreach on immigration mattered a lot there.

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We talked to folks not just on the macro level at Ecke's research about this, but obviously we were just in Vegas,

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canvassing with some of the members of the culinary union there.

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And to be honest, their kind of framework of Trump's slump ends up being what the macro theme of this election is about.

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It's about kind of how Donald Trump's choices on the economy has made folks' lives harder.

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It's about how his immigration rates have sown chaos.

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And we have seen that play out, I think, in tandem.

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The other thing I mentioned is kind of data centers and anti -AI.

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Gina Hinojoso winning in Texas over Greg Abbott.

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Even that South Carolina race, they were pouring a lot of money into Darlene Graham out of the hope that

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South Carolina could be a hub for AI.

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I mentioned Will Lawrence winning in Michigan.

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That kind of populist backlash, that bottom versus top, wasn't just about prices.

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It was also about anxiety about the future of work.

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And I think specifically surveillance, issues like flock cameras, data centers,

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of really roiling the public in a way that they haven't felt protected by in Congress.

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There's a clear call for some of those regulations now.

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And then you mentioned kind of Iran and Israel.

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I will put that as something obviously we've also explored.

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You know, we talked to Daria Liza Chevalier of New York and Abdul El -Sayed of Michigan,

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kind of about their America first argument from the left.

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And I think we saw that really work out.

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The argument was that you want money invested here, not going into foreign wars and things that you don't support.

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And that was a message they were hammering before the Iran war started, but got magnified after.

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So I would say those issues become the driving forces of democratic success.

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And I think it's really difficult to separate them because they all really flow back to that affordability question.

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Trump told voters to vote as if he were on the ballot.

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Then when he took a shellacking last night, he said, it's because I wasn't on the ballot.

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He told reporters last night that he would be happy to work with Democrats.

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And then also last night he posted a MAGA hat that said veto on it.

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He's clearly in his feelings.

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How bad was his night?

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Maybe scale of one to 10.

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Yeah, it was an 11.

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I mean, I think if you're Donald Trump, there's no space to hide here.

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I mean, I remember after the 2022 midterms, there was a sense that maybe

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Trump had gone away, you know, that because some of his election candidates, specifically ones that had backed his attempts to deny the results in 2020,

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that he would kind of fade into the background.

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And then he was able to come back like through kind of democratic persecution, through whining, through retribution, all this stuff,

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the stuff we know uh now there's nowhere to hide i mean i think

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that he has really succeeded as a figure that diagnoses problems that cause out liberal and progressive overreach.

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But there's never been a kind of public acceptance of his solutions he was proposing.

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Folks did not sign up for Project 2025.

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And so I think we're seeing that gap in some of the results.

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His handpicked candidates lost.

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He put Republicans in a tougher position.

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And then you had a kind of margin on the House that's going to give

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Democrats some wiggle room to really follow through on some of these accountability measures.

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And so I think Donald Trump is going to go through the stages of grief here.

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Like, you know, the first step might be, you know, maybe I'll work with them.

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But when that becomes clear, does he follow through on that?

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Does he use his kind of executive power that they've

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that they've steadily grown over the last two years to really try to insulate himself from Congress?

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I think we don't know those answers to the question yet, because this is a president who could respond to these results,

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not through moderation, but through escalation.

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And I think we should be really wary of taking what he says in

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that initial response as something that he'll still believe in a month or two.

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Okay.

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And the narrative coming out of this midterm election will be that Donald Trump lost big.

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I'm curious, did you see

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Democrats losing big anywhere?

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Were there any races that you saw a Republican take the W and I don't know, you were surprised by the result?

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I wouldn't say surprised.

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I mean, they held on in places like Nebraska.

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They held on in Florida, barely.

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I think those were kind of the floor for Republicans in terms of,

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I mean, I wouldn't even say like avoiding a shellacking because I would call last night such.

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And so there are places I think where you might have a Republican say,

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you know, I was able to kind of create some distance from Trump.

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I'm thinking of Florida because Ron DeSantis was someone who actually came out a couple months ago and said

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Trump needs to be more focused on gas prices and that there is a real problem there.

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And so I think, you know, you might have Byron Donald or someone try to exist in that mold.

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I think it's a good night if you're a someone who's trying to shape the non -Trump Republican Party, right?

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Your Ron DeSantis will look at this sort of result and say,

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hey, maybe there is some ability to pitch a conservative message that's not centered on this individual.

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Maybe that fever is breaking.

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But in terms of big results that will like help them sleep tonight, I didn't see much.

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Okay.

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All sorts of Democrats won last night.

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You know, your progressives, your religious

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Democrats, moderates, DSA people, obviously.

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Was there any particular type of Democratic win

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that really stood out to you or told us something about where the electorate's at right now?

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Yeah, you can point to the biggest winners.

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And I think some will say that maybe moderate candidates, and I use that in quotes, have the best night.

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I'm thinking about where

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Cooper's big result in North Carolina, or even some of the surprise wins from the Hamiltons, Tau Rico, or Annie Andrews in South Carolina,

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or even what we saw in Ohio.

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Those aren't necessarily people who pitch themselves directly in a progressive mode.

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But I would also say those lines are kind of fuzzy.

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And so I don't think that we can actually kind of ascribe success to one faction or the other.

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Just let me use this example.

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I told you how affordability grew out of Zoran's message in 2025.

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That's now something that's been adopted by the party largely, right?

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So is that a moderate or progressive message?

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I don't think it's clear to say.

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You could also talk about data centers as something that really grew out of a progressive outcry,

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but became something that the James Tauricos or others were backing also.

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I think if If you're a Democrat looking at the kind of macro takeaways, there is a call for universal health care.

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Right.

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However, whatever that means, there is a call for a pushback against ice, I would say, and whatever that means.

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But I don't think you can just say one side of the party had a good eye to the other.

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And I think that actually matters more, I would say, for the moderate wing of Democrats,

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because they've made that electability pitch so central to their primary arguments.

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They're not really competing in the contest of ideas, right?

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Like they haven't really met the moment when it talks about meeting people at the scope of their problems.

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Their argument has been we're the ones who can win in these states.

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I think after a night like last night,

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that might become a little harder to think they're the only ones who have an exclusive claim on electability, considering the wide results that you saw.

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So I think everyone gets to claim victory in a way.

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But the question is who the public believes.

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And I somewhat think

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that determinative kind of D .C top down vision of this is the only candidate

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that can win is being chipped away at.

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Okay, and then what do you think 2026 tells us?

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about 2028 i you know i don't want to get too ahead of ourselves here but you love elections

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they're going to be announcing for president like two weeks exactly exactly uh

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i think there's a couple lessons

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i you know good night for marco rubio good night for

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ron de santis good night for someone who's trying to pitch

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themselves as a different version of trump's america first party bad night for jd vance

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i mean uh jd vance is someone who has to walk the line between donald

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Trump in the next two years and trying to create his own kind of personal brand.

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I was baffled by him defending the Vivek Ramaswamy ad that I think will become notorious, that has already become notorious in this midterm cycle,

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the Democratic wins in Ohio, even thinking back to his defense of the ICE shootings that happened earlier this year.

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I think all of those were bad plays for J .D.

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Vance when we think about the future, and I think starts to create some of the signs that maybe some

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Republicans think they'll be able to challenge him.

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On the Democratic side, I think it's a win for fresh faces.

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I think it's a win for fresh ideas.

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I think it's a bad night maybe for Kamala Harris, like someone who represents maybe a return to the past

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or some of the old wounds of 2024 when it's clear the party is trying to turn the page.

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I will also add a couple, just one kind of wrinkle in the 2028 bucket is

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that Keisha Lance Bottoms winning in Georgia's governor's race means

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that John Ossoff and Ralph and Raphael Warnock can run for president

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because they're not concerned about the possibility that a Republican will replace him.

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Gina Hinojosa winning in the Texas governor race could mean

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that James Talrico can run for president and not have

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that same sort of fear about a Republican replacing them in the Senate.

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So those are big results when it comes to people's possibilities for the future

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and just shows you the extent to which last night reshaped the landscape.

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Estet Herndon, thank you so much.

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Thank you everyone for watching.

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Don't forget to subscribe to Vox on YouTube.

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Don't forget to download our new app.

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You can read all of our stories, watch all of our videos, listen to all of our podcasts.

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I'm Sean Rumsvirm.

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Let's do this again next week.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “How Democrats swept the midterms”. This video has 323 sentences and 4083 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:06. The speaker talks fast, about 185 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
margin noun	/ˈmɑɹ.d͡ʒɪn/	The edge of the paper, typically left blank when printing but sometimes used for annotations etc.
voter noun	/ˈvoʊtɚ/	Someone who votes or is entitled to vote.
progressive noun	/pɹəˈɡɹɛsɪv/	One with liberal or progressive political beliefs.
lean verb	/ˈliːn/	To incline, deviate, or bend, from a vertical position; to be in a position thus inclining or deviating.
pitch noun	/pɪt͡ʃ/	A throw; a toss; a cast, as of something from the hand.
versus	/ˈvɝsəs/	Against; in opposition to.
moderate adjective	/ˈmɑdəɹət/	Not excessive; acting in moderation.
overcome verb	/ˌəʊ.vəˈkʌm/	To surmount (a physical or abstract obstacle); to prevail over, to get the better of.
electoral adjective	/ɪˈlɛk.tɚ.əl/	Relating to or composed of electors.
pour verb	/poɹ/	To cause (liquid, or liquid-like substance) to flow in a stream, either out of a container or into it.
corruption noun	/kəˈɹʌpʃən/	The act of corrupting or of impairing integrity, virtue, or moral principle; the state of being corrupted or debased; loss of purity or integrity.
ballot noun	/ˈbælət/	A small ball placed in a container to cast a vote; now, by extension, a piece of paper or card used for this purpose, or some other means used to signify a…
demographic adjective	/ˌdɛm.əˈɡɹæf.ɪk/	Of or pertaining to demography.
backlash noun	/ˈbækˌlæʃ/	A suddenly reversed or backward motion, such as of a rope or elastic band when it snaps under tension.
universal adjective	/ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/	Of or pertaining to the universe.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
come out in verb		to be afflicted by (a visible disruption of the body)
come out verb	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	To be discovered; to be revealed.
grow out of verb		To emerge from (something); to take a particular shape as a result of (something); to come to exist from (an origin).
add up to verb		To have a particular effect in combination.
come back verb		To return to a place.
end up verb		To bring to a conclusion.
go away verb		To depart or leave a place.
go through verb		To travel from one end of something to the other.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

What do you think?
I'm glad that we can now turn the page.
Which were your favorites since you were watching so many of them?
That's someone we talked to.
I mean, you've mentioned a bunch of them.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	You've been talking · we've been tracking
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have heard · it's been · I've talked
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was ousted · were specifically drawn · cannot be overcome
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	somebody who necessarily · ones that had · someone who actually

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 71 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/, backlash /ˈbækˌlæʃ/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, regulation /ˌɹɛɡjʊˈleɪʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: electoral /ɪˈlɛk.tɚ.əl/, demographic /ˌdɛm.əˈɡɹæf.ɪk/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like margin, voter, progressive.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How Democrats swept the midterms - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?