50 Fun Facts About US Politics

Which animal became the Democrats' symbol after Andrew Jackson's foes twisted his surname into an insult?

The donkey was never the Democrats' only emblem: the rooster was also an official party symbol, and Alabama's Democrats kept it on their ballots until 1996.

Which senator looked tanned and relaxed beside a pale Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debate?

John F. Kennedy rested and prepared for the Chicago studio debate, while Nixon, still recovering from a hospital stay, refused make-up and let his stubble show on black-and-white TV sets.

Which Washington office-and-hotel complex, burgled in 1972, named the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon?

The Watergate housed the Democratic National Committee on its sixth floor, where burglars photographed files and tapped phones. Its last syllable now labels scandals around the world.

Which crop did future president Jimmy Carter's family grow and sell in Plains, Georgia?

Peanuts pulled Carter out of the Navy: he left the submarine service to take over the family business after his father died of cancer.

Which color have American TV networks used for Republican-won states on election maps since 2000?

Red was not settled as the Republican color until 2000. In 1980 NBC shaded Ronald Reagan's states blue, and anchor David Brinkley likened his landslide map to a suburban swimming pool.

Which state's 2000 presidential recount, fought over hanging chads, was halted by the US Supreme Court?

Florida was decided by 537 votes out of almost six million, by percentage the closest state result in any US presidential election. The justices stopped the count by five votes to four.

Which practice of drawing voting districts for partisan gain is named partly after an 1812 Massachusetts governor?

Gerrymandering was coined in 1812, when Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a map with a Boston-area district shaped like a salamander. His party kept the state senate, but he lost his own job.

Which Hollywood union did Ronald Reagan lead as president twice before he ever ran for public office?

Screen Actors Guild members first elected Reagan president in 1947, and he was back in 1959 during its fight for residual payments. He registered as a Republican only in 1962.

Which Senate stalling tactic takes its name from a Dutch word for a plundering freebooter?

Filibuster reached English in the 1850s by way of Spanish and first described adventurers who led private military raids on Latin America. Only later did it mean talking a bill to death.

Which label for an outgoing politician was first used for defaulting brokers at the London Stock Exchange?

The lame duck period shrank after 1933, when the Twentieth Amendment moved the start of a new Congress to January 3 and the inauguration to January 20.

Which name did Franklin Roosevelt give his Depression-era program of relief, recovery and reform?

New Deal entered politics almost by accident: a speechwriter added the phrase to Roosevelt's nomination acceptance speech at the last minute.

Which California Democrat became the first woman elected Speaker of the House, taking the gavel in 2007?

Nancy Pelosi won the job a second time in 2019, which made her the first former Speaker to reclaim the gavel since Sam Rayburn in 1955.

Which democratic socialist, once mayor of Burlington, is the longest-serving independent in congressional history?

Bernie Sanders won that mayoral race in 1981 by just 10 votes. He sits as an independent yet has twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination.

Which 1973 Supreme Court ruling is half named after the Dallas district attorney who defended Texas abortion law?

Roe v. Wade set Norma McCorvey, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, against prosecutor Henry Wade. The ruling stood for 49 years until Dobbs overruled it in 2022.

Which president became the first to be impeached twice, with the Senate acquitting him both times?

Donald Trump's second impeachment came one week before his term expired, so the Senate trial that followed was the first ever held for a former president.

Which state did Barack Obama represent in the US Senate when he won the presidency in 2008?

Illinois sent Obama to Washington in 2005 after nearly eight years in its state senate. He was born in Honolulu and first came to Chicago as a community organizer.

Which Republican, never elected president or vice president, pardoned Richard Nixon a month after replacing him?

Gerald Ford paid for the pardon at once: his approval rating fell 21 points within weeks, and by January 1975 more Americans disapproved of him than approved.

Which former vice president shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change?

Al Gore shared the prize with the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, in the same year that An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about his campaign, won an Academy Award.

Which Wisconsin senator's 1950s hunt for communists in government gave English a word for reckless accusation?

Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 by 67 votes to 22. The word built on his name appeared in a Washington Post cartoon within two months of his first big speech.

Which Texas billionaire won nearly 19 percent of the 1992 presidential vote without carrying a single state?

Ross Perot took 19.7 million votes, the best share for a candidate outside the two major parties since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, yet finished with no electoral votes.

Which weekday, tagged Super in primary season, sees the greatest number of states vote for presidential nominees?

Tuesday in early primary season can settle about a third of all convention delegates, more than any other day. Southern states built the 1988 version to increase their region's influence.

Which nickname stuck to the Progressive Party that Theodore Roosevelt founded to fight the 1912 election?

Bull Moose came from Roosevelt's boast about his own strength after he lost the Republican nomination to his former protege, President William Howard Taft.

Which New York governor did a famous Chicago Tribune headline wrongly declare the winner over Harry Truman?

Thomas Dewey got his headline because a printers' strike forced the paper to go to press several hours early. Truman gleefully held a copy up for photographers.

Which name was given to the 1960s domestic agenda that created Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start?

Great Society was the vision Lyndon Johnson set out in a May 1964 speech at the University of Michigan. Its laws also brought food stamps and federal money for poorer schools.

Which Alabama city's 1965 marches, met with violence on a bridge, pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act?

Selma marchers were charged by state troopers with batons and tear gas on March 7, 1965, a day remembered as Bloody Sunday. Eight days later the president asked Congress for the law.

Which lawyer won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases before becoming its first Black justice in 1967?

Thurgood Marshall's wins included Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the ruling against segregated schools. He later argued the government's cases as solicitor general.

Which cable network launched in 1979 to carry the first televised sessions of the House of Representatives?

C-SPAN is a private nonprofit funded by the cable and satellite companies that carry it. By 2011 it had aired more than 24,000 hours of floor debate.

Which highway ringing Washington, DC since 1964 lends its name to a phrase for political insiders?

The Beltway, officially Interstate 495, inspired an idiom for matters that fascinate federal officials, lobbyists and reporters far more than the general public.

Which Democrat won the White House in 1884, lost it in 1888 and then won it back in 1892?

Grover Cleveland is counted as both the 22nd and the 24th president, the precedent for numbering a leader who returns after a gap. He was also the first Democrat elected after the Civil War.

Which state, Walter Mondale's home, was the only one Ronald Reagan failed to carry in the 1984 election?

Minnesota stayed loyal to its former senator by just 3,761 votes. Asked that December what he wanted for Christmas, Reagan joked that the state would have been nice.

Which running mate tied Thomas Jefferson in the Electoral College in 1800, throwing the election to the House?

Aaron Burr and Jefferson each received 73 electoral votes, and the House needed 36 ballots to break the deadlock. The mess produced the Twelfth Amendment.

Which New York City Democratic machine won a national name for corruption when Boss Tweed was convicted in 1873?

Tammany Hall took its name from Tamanend, a Lenape chief turned folk hero, and built its power by helping Irish Catholic immigrants find their feet in the city.

Which 1920s oil-lease bribery scandal under President Warren Harding was named after an oil field in Wyoming?

Teapot Dome sent Interior Secretary Albert Fall to jail for taking bribes from oil companies, making him the first presidential cabinet member ever imprisoned.

Which term for a late, election-swinging news event was coined by Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign manager?

October surprise was William Casey's phrase for the Reagan camp's fear that a last-minute release of the American hostages in Iran would hand Jimmy Carter re-election.

Which Brooklyn Democrat, the first Black woman elected to Congress, ran for president in 1972?

Shirley Chisholm was the only woman in the House's first-year class of 1969. Born in Brooklyn, she spent part of her childhood at school in Barbados.

Which flower names the 1964 TV attack ad that cut from a girl counting petals to a nuclear explosion?

Daisy ran as a paid commercial only once, during an NBC Monday movie, yet it is credited with helping Lyndon Johnson to a landslide over Barry Goldwater.

Which Treasury secretary founded the Federalists, widely counted as the first political party in the United States?

Alexander Hamilton's party dominated the national government until 1801 but produced only one president, John Adams, and fielded its last candidate in 1816.

Which Harper's Weekly cartoonist is credited with first drawing the Republican Party as an elephant?

Thomas Nast drew the elephant in an 1874 cartoon about rumors that President Grant wanted a third term. His Civil War Santa Claus is recognized as the first modern picture of the character.

Which Marine lieutenant colonel became the face of the Iran-Contra affair in televised 1987 congressional hearings?

Oliver North was convicted on three felony counts in 1989, but every conviction was reversed on appeal. He later ran for a Virginia seat in the Senate and lost.

Which insult for Northerners who moved South after the Civil War now labels a candidate with no local ties?

Carpetbagger comes from the cheap luggage made of carpet fabric that many of the newcomers carried. White Southerners who sided with them earned an insult of their own, scalawag.

Which FBI second-in-command revealed in 2005 that he was Deep Throat, the secret source for Woodward and Bernstein?

Mark Felt was 91 when he told Vanity Fair, ending three decades of guessing. The source's first newsroom alias, My Friend, had shared his initials all along.

Which Montana Republican became the first woman elected to Congress, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment?

Jeannette Rankin served just two terms, 24 years apart, and voted against entering both world wars. In 1941 she was the only member of Congress to oppose war with Japan.

Which Republican won the disputed 1876 election, then withdrew the last federal troops from the South?

Rutherford Hayes was declared the winner over Democrat Samuel Tilden under an informal bargain, and the departure of the soldiers is widely regarded as the end of Reconstruction.

Which state's vote sealed women's suffrage in 1920 after a young legislator heeded a letter from his mother?

Tennessee became the final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920. Representative Harry Burn carried his mother Febb's letter in his coat pocket as he voted.

Which Supreme Court nominee's 1987 rejection by the Senate turned his surname into a verb for sinking a candidate?

Robert Bork lost by 58 votes to 42. Fourteen years earlier, as acting attorney general, he had carried out Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the White House.

Which RAND Corporation analyst leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War, to newspapers in 1971?

Daniel Ellsberg faced up to 115 years in prison under the Espionage Act, but a judge dismissed every charge in 1973 because of government misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering.

Which Socialist won nearly a million votes for president in 1920 while locked in a federal prison in Atlanta?

Eugene V. Debs was serving time under the Sedition Act for urging young men to resist the draft. Warren Harding, the winner of that election, commuted his sentence in 1921.

Which nickname was given to the breakaway Southern Democrats who ran Strom Thurmond for president in 1948?

Dixiecrats bolted after Harry Truman proposed civil rights laws and the 1948 Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank. Their ticket carried four Deep South states and won 39 electoral votes.

Which Labor secretary, the first woman in a presidential cabinet, helped design the Social Security Act of 1935?

Frances Perkins held the post for 12 years, longer than any other Labor secretary, and was also the first woman to enter the presidential line of succession.

Which pollster won fame in 1936 by correctly forecasting Franklin Roosevelt's win over a giant magazine poll?

George Gallup's young institute sampled just 50,000 people, while the Literary Digest's huge mail poll called a decisive win for Alf Landon. The magazine folded within 18 months.