AP US Government
Chapter 13 Study and Review Guide
North Carolina was carried by Obama in 2008 and was carried by Romney in 2012.
In 1964 Barry Goldwater tried too hard to appeal to his party’s activists and lost the election as a result.
Most candidates running in a general election tend to move their campaigns toward the ideological center.
One reason that candidates visit many localities is to motivate local activists.
The person closest to the candidate who makes the essential day-to-day decisions is the campaign manager.
The Federal Election Commission is the bureaucratic agency in charge of monitoring campaign activity.
Campaign consultants were first used in campaigns in the 1930s.
The Tillman Act was the 1907 legislation that prohibited corporations from making direct contributions to candidates for federal office.
In one recent election, researchers found that individual donors accounted for 85 percent of contributions to presidential candidates.
Buckley v. Valeo was theSCOTUS decision that determined that no limits could be placed on the amount of money a candidate spends on his or her campaign in an election?
John Anderson was a third-party candidate who received enough votes to qualify for public campaign funding.
The brief, clever quotes that candidates hope will be replayed after media events are known as sound bites.
Candidate debates became a regular part of presidential campaigns in the 1980s.
The Clinton and Gore presidential ticket was the first to use the Internet in a national campaign.
Thomas Jefferson, running in 1796, was portrayed as an atheist and a coward.
Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses in the 2012 Republican nomination campaign.
Most elections follow the same structure, consisting of a nomination campaign and general election campaign.
One of the primary dangers of the nomination campaign is that candidates can become too ideologically extreme.
Nomination campaigns involve candidates of the same political party.
As the cost of campaigns has risen and fund-raising has become more important, the staff position of finance chair has also grown in prestige and significance.
A pollster might be asked by a candidate to conduct a public opinion survey.
One of the most basic methods of canvassing is going door to door to solicit votes.
The federal government has worked to regulate campaign finance for more than a century.
Until 2002, the primary federal regulation of campaign finance occurred according to the Federal Election Campaign Act.
Under current rules, a national political party can give $43,100 to a Senate candidate per election.
Nonprofit, tax-exempt groups that can expressly advocate for candidates and are not required to disclose the names of contributors are called 501(c) groups.
The Super PAC that spent the most in the 2012 election was a Republican group.
The most dominant feature of traditional media coverage of campaigns is coverage of the “horse race.”
Staging media events is one strategy that campaigns use to control the media.
Sometimes negative ads do not even mention the sponsor of the ads.
Both during and after the 2008 election, opponents of Barack Obama suggested he could not run for or serve as president because he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States.
A candidate who wants to re-craft his/her campaign message would MOST likely work closely with the communications director to create a compelling and effective message.
A candidate running a general election campaign would want to recruit extra volunteers for canvassing for the period one month before the election.
Suppose you are quite wealthy and contributed money to the campaign of one candidate in a primary election, then gave money to another campaign after that first candidate dropped out. You also contributed to the national party committee and your state party committee, as well as to a political action committee. By the time the general elections come in November, the most that you could have contributed would be $50,800.
The challenges to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act suggest that special interest groups want to be able to support their candidate of choice without financial restrictions.
Suppose you are a candidate who has been participating in an illicit marital affair, and you fear that the truth may be revealed. The MOST effective way to minimize damage would be to air an inoculation ad.
A campaign manager who was attempting to make clear that his candidate was suitable for the presidency would most likely prepare his candidate very well for televised debates.
Even though a candidate may not approve of negative ads, he/she might run them because a negative ad can give a voter a reason to vote against the opponent.
If your campaign has very limited funding, you might do robo-calls.
Considering the large number of candidates for the Republication nomination in 2012 and the many debates among these candidates, you could have expected Mitt Romney to perform very well in the general election debates because he had been debating his points for months.
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate in the 2012 election suggests that Romney was concerned the Republican base did not view him as conservative enough.
While moving to one end of the spectrum might motivate a party base during nomination, it might actually alienate more moderate or on-the-fence voters of the general election.
The role of campaign consultants has become so important in today’s campaigns because candidates need specialists to help them make the most of fund-raising, media relations, and Internet outreach.
A candidate with limited funds available would most likely want to build a staff consisting of a campaign manager and a large number of dedicated volunteers.
A campaign looking for support from various political action committees would find that support would be more readily available from a 527 group if the candidate is a Democrat.
Having two senators work across the aisle limited accusations of partisanship and was likely behind Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold working together to pass the 2002 campaign finance reform bill.
The largest increase in 527 political committees occurred in 2004.
The traditional media provide candidates with free advertising and follow campaigns much as they would a horse race.
The fact that the news media devote little times to campaign coverage is the MOST likely reason that candidates use sound bites instead of long explanations of their agendas and positions.
Campaign advertisements can work both for and against a candidate since ads deliver the desired message, but news media are increasingly analyzing and reporting on their accuracy.