8.1 Elections, Campaigns & the Electoral Process

Why This Topic Matters on the GED

CG.e.3 (political campaigns, elections and the electoral process) is one of the most concretely testable items inside Civics and Government, which is already 50% of the Social Studies exam. Unlike broad principles such as federalism, this sub-topic has hard numbers attached to it — 538 electors, 270 to win, elections every 2, 4, and 6 years — which makes it a favorite source for GED's technology-enhanced item types: a fill-in-the-blank asking how many electoral votes are needed, a hot-spot map asking you to click the states that decided an election, or a drag-and-drop sequence of the steps from primary to inauguration. Expect stimulus material: a bar chart of turnout by age group, a map shaded by electoral votes, or a political cartoon showing a legislator drawing oddly shaped districts. The question is rarely "what is gerrymandering" in the abstract — it is "given this cartoon, what does the artist believe is happening to democracy," which blends this content topic with the reasoning skills from Chapter 2 (SSP.5, SSP.6).

Types of Elections

American elections are not one event but a layered sequence:

• A primary election is a within-party contest where voters choose which candidate will represent that party in the general election. Primaries can be open (any voter may participate) or closed (only registered party members may vote).
• A caucus is an older, in-person alternative to a primary — voters gather in local meetings (famously in Iowa) to publicly declare and debate their preference rather than casting a private ballot.
• The general election is held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November; voters choose among each party's nominee (and any independents) for the actual office.
• A special election can happen at any time to fill an unexpected vacancy, such as a senator's death or resignation, outside the normal election calendar.
• Midterm elections occur every 2 years, exactly halfway through a president's 4-year term. Every one of the 435 House seats is up (2-year terms), along with roughly a third of the Senate's 100 seats, because senators serve staggered 6-year terms divided into three "classes." Midterms typically have lower voter turnout than presidential-year elections, and the president's party often loses seats — a pattern GED passages sometimes ask you to explain or identify from a results table.

The Electoral College

The president is not chosen by a national popular vote. Instead, each state is assigned a number of electors equal to its total congressional representation (House seats + 2 Senate seats); Washington, D.C. contributes 3 electors under the 23rd Amendment. That produces 538 total electors, and a candidate needs 270 — a simple majority — to win. In 48 states and D.C., the system is winner-take-all: whichever candidate wins the state's popular vote receives all of that state's electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska are the two exceptions, splitting most of their electors by congressional district. Because electoral votes are awarded state by state rather than as one national pool, it is possible for a candidate to win the national popular vote but lose the Electoral College — this happened in 2000 (Bush over Gore) and 2016 (Trump over Clinton), and both elections are common reference points in GED stimulus passages about the Electoral College's design and its critics.

Redistricting and Gerrymandering

Article I of the Constitution requires a census every 10 years, which reapportions the House's 435 seats among the states based on population change and forces states to redraw congressional district boundaries. When a state legislature draws those lines to help one political party or protect incumbents rather than to reflect population shifts fairly, the result is called gerrymandering. Two specific techniques come up repeatedly on GED-style items:

A political cartoon showing a legislator's pen shaped like a knife carving up a map, or an oddly shaped, snake-like district on a hot-spot map, is almost always testing whether you can recognize gerrymandering from a visual.

Campaign Finance: PACs and Super PACs

Candidates and parties raise money through Political Action Committees (PACs), organizations that collect contributions (subject to federal limits) and donate directly to campaigns. The landscape changed after Citizens United v. FEC (2010), in which the Supreme Court ruled that political spending by corporations, unions, and other associations is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. That decision enabled the rise of Super PACs, which face no limit on how much they can raise or spend on ads and other independent activities — as long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate's own campaign.

Voter Turnout Patterns

GED charts frequently present turnout broken down by demographic group. As a general pattern (not a fixed rule for any single election), turnout is higher in presidential-election years than in midterm years, and turnout tends to rise with age — voters 65 and older typically vote at noticeably higher rates than voters 18–24. A GED item might show a table like the one below and ask which age group had the highest or lowest participation, or what the overall trend suggests:

The correct reading of a table like this is purely descriptive — identify what the numbers show (turnout rises with age) without adding outside opinions about why, unless the passage itself supplies a reason.