US Politics
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50 free US Politics trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
American politics is a long-running argument with a remarkable cast: party bosses, crusading reporters, shock candidates and presidents who rose or fell on a single night of television. Its vocabulary is just as colorful, full of animal mascots, borrowed insults and nicknames that outlived the people who coined them. This quiz covers the stories behind the headlines. You will meet the parties and how they got their symbols, elections decided by a handful of votes, scandals that changed how Washington works, and the lawmakers, judges and campaigners who broke barriers along the way. Modern names sit beside the founders and the machine politicians of the nineteenth century. It is pitched for anyone who follows the news and wants to test what they really know, from civics students to pub quiz regulars. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story as well as the fact.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal became the Democrats' symbol after Andrew Jackson's foes twisted his surname into an insult?
Donkey
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.
Q 02Which senator looked tanned and relaxed beside a pale Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debate?
John F. Kennedy
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.
Q 03Which Washington office-and-hotel complex, burgled in 1972, named the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon?
The Watergate
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.
Q 04Which crop did future president Jimmy Carter's family grow and sell in Plains, Georgia?
Peanuts
Peanuts pulled Carter out of the Navy: he left the submarine service to take over the family business after his father died of cancer.
Q 05Which color have American TV networks used for Republican-won states on election maps since 2000?
Red
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.
Q 06Which state's 2000 presidential recount, fought over hanging chads, was halted by the US Supreme Court?
Florida
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.
Q 07Which practice of drawing voting districts for partisan gain is named partly after an 1812 Massachusetts governor?
Gerrymandering
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.
Q 08Which Hollywood union did Ronald Reagan lead as president twice before he ever ran for public office?
Screen Actors Guild
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.
Q 09Which Senate stalling tactic takes its name from a Dutch word for a plundering freebooter?
Filibuster
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.
Q 10Which label for an outgoing politician was first used for defaulting brokers at the London Stock Exchange?
Lame duck
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.
Q 11Which name did Franklin Roosevelt give his Depression-era program of relief, recovery and reform?
New Deal
New Deal entered politics almost by accident: a speechwriter added the phrase to Roosevelt's nomination acceptance speech at the last minute.
Q 12Which California Democrat became the first woman elected Speaker of the House, taking the gavel in 2007?
Nancy Pelosi
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.
Q 13Which democratic socialist, once mayor of Burlington, is the longest-serving independent in congressional history?
Bernie Sanders
Q 21Which weekday, tagged Super in primary season, sees the greatest number of states vote for presidential nominees?
Tuesday
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.
Q 22Which nickname stuck to the Progressive Party that Theodore Roosevelt founded to fight the 1912 election?
Bull Moose
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.
Q 23Which New York governor did a famous Chicago Tribune headline wrongly declare the winner over Harry Truman?
Thomas Dewey
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.
Q 14Which 1973 Supreme Court ruling is half named after the Dallas district attorney who defended Texas abortion law?
Roe v. Wade
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.
Q 15Which president became the first to be impeached twice, with the Senate acquitting him both times?
Donald Trump
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.
Q 16Which state did Barack Obama represent in the US Senate when he won the presidency in 2008?
Illinois
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.
Q 17Which Republican, never elected president or vice president, pardoned Richard Nixon a month after replacing him?
Gerald Ford
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.
Q 18Which former vice president shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change?
Al Gore
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.
Q 19Which Wisconsin senator's 1950s hunt for communists in government gave English a word for reckless accusation?
Joseph McCarthy
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.
Q 20Which Texas billionaire won nearly 19 percent of the 1992 presidential vote without carrying a single state?
Ross Perot
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.
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.
Q 24Which name was given to the 1960s domestic agenda that created Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start?
Great Society
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.
Q 25Which Alabama city's 1965 marches, met with violence on a bridge, pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act?
Selma
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.
Q 26Which lawyer won 29 of his 32 Supreme Court cases before becoming its first Black justice in 1967?
Thurgood Marshall
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.
Q 27Which cable network launched in 1979 to carry the first televised sessions of the House of Representatives?
C-SPAN
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.
Q 28Which highway ringing Washington, DC since 1964 lends its name to a phrase for political insiders?
The Beltway
The Beltway, officially Interstate 495, inspired an idiom for matters that fascinate federal officials, lobbyists and reporters far more than the general public.
Q 29Which Democrat won the White House in 1884, lost it in 1888 and then won it back in 1892?
Grover Cleveland
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.
Q 30Which state, Walter Mondale's home, was the only one Ronald Reagan failed to carry in the 1984 election?
Minnesota
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.