November 2, 2010 is Congressional mid-term Election Day. All the 435 members of the House of Representatives and 36 Senate seats will be decided and the winners will constitute the new 112th Congress that will be sworn in on January 3, 2011.
Election season provides a compelling reason to launch a discussion of the Electoral College and the part that it will play in the 2012 presidential election.
Grades K-5 Learning Activity
Hand out a printout of the PDF outline map of the United States to each student, along with coloring utensils. Give the students a list of which states voted for John McCain (color red) in the 2008 presidential election and which states voted for Barack Obama (color blue) and have them color in the map accordingly.
Using this formula (Senators + Representatives), have students use the information in the Government sections of the CultureGrams States Edition to fill in their map with the number of electoral votes each state has.
Compare the sum of the blue states' electoral votes and those of the red states. Are they closer than the map makes them appear?
Explain to students that, typically, it is thought that states which are home to large urban populations (and are therefore more densely populated) tend to be democrats, while those home to rural populations (and therefore more sparsely populated) tend to be republicans.
Have students test this assumption using the Create Your Own Table function in the States Edition.
Have students create tables that display the population densities (population per square mile) for both red and blue states. Using this data, have them create and compare averages for each group.
What do their findings prove? Why might more densely populated states vote Democratic, while more sparsely populated ones vote Republican?
