If you stretch a rubber band it gets longer. The two ends of the band get farther apart. This might be easier to imagine with a broken rubber band rather than a loop. If you stretch a lead, whether in sports, politics, or anything else, the gap gets larger. The two sides get farther apart.

If you have the pile of links why not post them? This is just a screenshot of truncated headlines masquerading as a source.

One of the headlines is "Samuel Alito Is Mad You Can't Be Bigoted Towards Gay People Anymore." This could be an article about the current conservative supreme court protecting the rights of gay people, or it could be an article about how the supreme court is planning to strip rights from gay people. I don't know because you didn't actually post a source, you posted a screenshot of a list of truncated headlines.