Election 2000: Tracking the Candidates and the Issues
Grades 8-12
Overview
This activity will allow students to track some of the candidates for President, Senate, and the House of Representatives throughout the campaign season. They'll focus on the candidates' positions on a variety of issues that the class has deemed important. Students will work in groups and track the candidates' statements and actions for a particular issue to which their group has been assigned. They'll record their findings weekly in a scrapbook and will be asked to present monthly reports to the class. Read over the steps in this activity carefully and feel free to modify it to fit your own curriculum and calendar.
Please note: It's very important that the issues the class chooses are major enough to be discussed by most candidates on a regular basis. Some good examples would be education, crime, the environment, and health care. If a group finds that the candidates don't seem to be saying or doing much that relates to the group's assigned issue, they may need to find another issue to track.
Objectives
Students will:
- Explain whether they plan to vote (or whether they would if they were old enough) and whether they think most 18 year-olds will choose to vote.
- List the four political issues that concern them most.
- Share their issue lists with the class and vote on six issues for the class to cover.
- Find out who's running for President, Senate, and the House of Representatives, and record the candidates' names.
- Use the Internet to find out the basic philosophies of the Reform, Green, and Libertarian parties, and list some of these philosophies.
- In groups, create scrapbooks in which to keep track of the candidates' stances on the group's assigned issue.
- Keep track of candidates' statements and actions concerning the group's assigned issue, record their findings on a worksheet, and place the worksheets into the scrapbook.
- Share their findings with the class each month.
- Present their overall findings and assessment of the candidates at the end of the school year or campaign.
- Evaluate the impact of this activity on their future political involvement.
Extensions
Have students conduct further research on minority parties. How many minority parties are there? Why are they less well-known than the Democrats and the Republicans? Why have some candidates defected from the two major parties and switched to another party?
Have students stage a mock debate in which they role-play real candidates debating the issues. They'll need to decide what they think each candidate would say. They can even try to adopt the candidates' mannerisms in a humorous way (as in Saturday Night Live), as long as they present serious and credible arguments on the issues.
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