The Living Room Candidate

Though television production quality has improved over the years, strategies used to win elections can be very similar. The Living Room Candidate is a site featuring more than 300 television commercials from every presidential election year since 1952, when the first campaign TV ads aired.

Lessons have been designed for use by high school teachers and students. Each lesson meets national common core standards in English Language Arts. Also making this site useful is the Admaker, which is an online editing tool that allows students to remix a historic campaign ad or to make a new ad. 

The site also includes a searchable database and features commentary, historical background, election results, and navigation organized by year, type of ad, and issue. There is a playlist feature that allows visitors to select, annotate, and share their own groups of ads, and to view playlists by guest contributors.

Each selected commercial is accompanied by a list of related ads. There is a transcript for each ad and a feature that allows visitors to search the entire database by title and by words in the transcripts.