The collection below is our list of the top 10 best political themes for WordPress in 2016. Most are responsive and many offer interesting features like built-in donation collection, event calendars, and email contact forms.
Political campaigns are expensive, and it’s easy to spend big money on consultants that push custom websites. Using themes like the ones we’ve compiled are a great way to save money without sacrificing the professional appearance of your candidacy.
About Political Blogging
Political blogging is not just about your skills and experience. It’s also about being able to present yourself in a professional manner and convince the voters that you are the best choice. Your political success relies on your campaign and how well you can establish trust with the voter.
What Features to Look For in a Political Theme?
Regardless of which theme you choose for your website, be sure it has a responsive design. Look for features such as a donation form and email capture form that integrates with an email newsletter service. An events calendar or integration with a popular events calendar plugin is a welcome feature, as well as easy customization options. Your homepage should immediately communicate your core values, clearly present your policies, and outline who you are.
Who Should Use Political Themes?
Political themes aren’t reserved just for presidential candidates and major elections. Anyone with a vested interest in politics such as mayors, senators, congressmen, or city officials can benefit from using a political theme. Even those looking to form their own independent political party will have greater success if their website looks professional and trustworthy.
Do you have recommendations for additional themes? Leave us a note in the comments section with a link to the theme information page.
Politico Theme
Politico theme is the top-selling political WordPress template listed on Themeforest. Look for a responsive layout and Retina compatibility alongside color and font options through the theme customizer.
This theme offers an election countdown timer and high impact banner/slider, as well as built-in donate buttons.
Election Theme
The Election Theme is the newest addition to the ThemeForest collection of political WordPress themes and is one of the best options on the market. The clean, responsive layout follows current design trends, making a website that looks and feels like it could be from a custom design studio.
Campaign Theme
The Campaign Theme offers a range of color and layout options, making it a great fit for candidates in any party.
The theme author has built Campaign with some specific plugins in mind to extend the feature set. Look for compatibility with the WP Email Capture plugin and the Events Calendar plugin, allowing for easy email contact collection and public appearance scheduling. The Campaign Theme is fully responsive and offers both a boxed and full-width layout.
Politician Theme
The Politician theme has been downloaded nearly 2,000 times on Theme Forest, and while its authors are no longer releasing updates it will continue to offer value to users.
The theme is fully responsive and translation ready. Plus, it offers six color variations to better suit your brand or political affiliation.
Candidate Theme
The Candidate theme is designed for political figures, political parties, or grassroots movements.
The theme offers fully responsive layouts and an easy-to-use theme options panel and is packaged with Slider Revolution.
Political Press
Political Press advertises an easy-to-use theme options panel and responsive layout built on Twitter Bootstrap 3.0. Look for a wide content area feel on larger viewports and a thoughtful use of images to highlight featured content.
The Political Press Theme is WPML plugin compatible, allowing you to launch your website in multiple languages.
Hero
The Hero theme, produced by the folks over at ThemeTrust, presents your political campaign message in a clean and responsive format. The parallax header starts the theme off right, grabbing your attention and leading into the minimalist design for clearing away all of the clutter you typically find with political websites. Showcase your cause and what your organization does with nicely formatted columns and icons, presented underneath a strong banner announcing your message.
The built-in options panel turns website modification into a simple task, consolidating all of the necessary settings under one area. Upload your logo within seconds, create custom widgets, and use the convenient slideshow shortcode to turn a group of photos into an elegant slideshow. The theme also comes packaged with a filterable portfolio and more shortcodes for creating items like buttons and columns.
Legislator
From RescueThemes, the Legislator WordPress theme has it all in terms of functionality. The responsive theme assists in modern marketing with a large call to action on the homepage and a full-screen header area to display videos, grab emails, and explain more about the candidate.
Packaged with six color schemes, you can brand your site to a specific audience. Accept donations with ease, and add events when your campaign is coming to town. Images are essential for helping people get to know the candidate, so the image gallery and portfolio carry users through a myriad of photos. One key feature, although simple, allows you to move around widgets on the homepage, sidebar, and footer.
For the more technical crowd, the theme includes a fully layered PSD file and documentation for the ultimate in customization opportunities.
The Practice
The Practice theme is one of many ThemeFuse themes acceptable for a political platform. Tailored mainly for law firms, it only takes a few adjustments to setup an organized political website for your followers. To start, the animated slider reveals various photos from your campaign, and the responsive and retina-ready display ensures that everyone has a chance to view the website on any device.
Along with shortcodes, SEO integration, and multi-language capabilities, using this theme to present your political statement is well within reach.
Candidate
The Candidate theme incorporates a few interesting elements for designing the quintessential political website. The boxed and wide layouts add versatility to the design process, but the true standout feature is the inclusion of Visual Composer, a plugin that usually sells for $28. This plugin works as a drag-and-drop editor for moving around items like widgets, headers, and logos.
Implement an events calendar, change your color schemes, and even use the crowdfunding system to bring financial backing to your cause. The theme comes packaged with extensive documentation and PSD files, making it easy for more advanced designers to make more complex changes.
We Stand
We Stand, a theme for politics, churches, and charities, has a specific layout for those interested in making a politically-based website. The responsive theme includes PayPal integration for accepting contributions, and you can even implement the WooCommerce plugin for selling campaign merchandise. Use the Contact Form 7 plugin to keep in touch with your followers, and manage all of your events in one simple engine.
The Cause Management section tells people your campaign platforms and what you can do to help the world. The visual page builder offers a drag-and-drop interface to assist people who don’t want to mess around with code. The theme is translation-ready, allowing you to reach out to those who may not speak your language. Choose from unlimited colors and sidebars to brand your site and fit as much content as you need to display. The We Stand theme also includes backup options to ensure that nothing is lost in case of an attack or hack.
Advocator
The Advocator theme is a WordPress theme for non-profits and charities that works well for politicians and political organizations. The light, clean, and responsive design is just the start, and the filterable gallery and portfolio help reveal your causes and issues you’re running on. Accept donations without problem and add events to keep your followers up-to-date. Connect the email system to MailChimp to send out blasts and inform people of the issues.
The theme comes with a fully layered PSD file for the ultimate customization, and the various post formats let you generate quotes, links, asides, images, and more. Widgetized areas are offered on the homepage, sidebar, and footer, and the unlimited color scheme choices help your site stand out from the people you’re running against. Along with localization and high-quality theme support, the Advocator theme is a wise choice for any political movement.
Mercy
Check out the Mercy theme if you’re running a political campaign or looking to represent your NGO online. To start, the theme offers a drag and drop page builder, which we all know makes it so much easier to create a site. Mercy has options for direct integration with WooCommerce that help when trying to collect money for donations, or for selling merchandise. The theme provides translation tools for connecting to a broader audience, while the over 400 Google Fonts work nicely for branding purposes.
A cause management area is a nice bonus, while the events management module shows followers exactly where the political movements are going to occur. As with most of the themes on this list, the Mercy solution is built to look wonderful on all mobile devices. Colors and backgrounds are unlimited and the theme integrates with tools like MailChimp and Contact Form 7.
Parlament
The Parlament WordPress theme delivers exactly what you need if you’re trying to make a political statement. The theme has a responsive layout for your followers to check through mobile devices, and the sleek design puts the majority of the focus on your message. In addition, the WooCommerce plugin integrates flawlessly with the Parlament theme, giving you an option to accept donations. The brilliant design engages visitors, and the fast speed ensures that users will see your content within seconds of loading the website. The events calendar is one of the more crucial parts of a political website, so you can manage certain events on the back end and let people know when you’re holding a fundraiser or rally. Also, several parallax sections are scattered throughout the homepage, generating a creative effect that helps out with your calls to action.
Several social media buttons are packaged into the Parlament theme, and you get a beautiful slider for showing pictures from the campaign trail or banners that announce certain events. Use videos that are embedded into the theme, and implement an email collection form for sending out newsletters about your progress. Along with a widget for sharing candidate information, the Parlament WordPress theme has some handy tools for running your campaign.
Politic
Check out the Politic WordPress theme if you’re interested in a fully widgetized homepage. We enjoy this setup for beginners and even advanced users since it helps you keep your hands free of any source code, essentially turning your homepage into a drag-and-drop interface. The theme integrates with the BuddyPress plugin, which turns your website into a social network. Followers can build profiles and discuss issues with each other, all from the convenience of your site. The visual shortcode generator gives you the tools needed to make items like buttons and columns. Social media buttons are included along with a spot for collecting emails.
Include a photo stream in a widget and setup the blog to boost your search engine rankings and keep people up-to-date with your campaign. Along with a contact form, events page, and tools for changing colors, you can’t go wrong with the Politic theme.
Right Way
The Right Way theme is a viable option for all political campaigns, especially considering it has a bold and exciting design that is sure to grab donors’ attention. The theme is mobile-ready, includes multiple skins, and comes with an events calendar for keeping people in the loop about campaign events and rallies.
The header is fully customizable and you can include text, images, custom colors, backgrounds, or buttons. For example, you may want to have a quick button for people to click through and donate to your campaign; it only takes the click of a button to implement this feature. Another reason we like the Right Way theme is because it comes with the Visual Composer plugin for easy drag-and-drop site creation.
Flawless
The Flawless WordPress theme remains true to its name since you gain access to a beautiful design from some of the more reputable developers online. This multipurpose theme has a completely responsive layout and comes with a page builder that makes it much easier for customers to build their sites without the need for any code.
The header has various options for setting up a parallax effect. You can implement parallax effects throughout the homepage since it is broken into multiple rows. If you’re not a fan of parallax you can also use colored backgrounds. Choose your custom skin to make people remember your political movement, and try out the mega menu if you plan on having hundreds of pages on your site. This is particularly useful if you’re thinking about setting up a store or a blog, as you can better organize your product pages or posts this way.
City Government
The City Government WordPress theme is an impressive solution for those interested in a political template. The top part of the theme has a beautiful header where you can share photos from the campaign trail. The responsive and retina-ready design is there to ensure that your site is accessible to all users. Google Fonts are packaged into the theme, which is particularly useful for when you’d like to keep the typography consistent with printed materials. The most impressive feature is the events management area; it combines all of the events on the backend and works similar to a Google Calendar.
None of your followers will miss out on an upcoming rally or political speech because they can come to your site to see exactly what’s next in the lineup. Another great tool involves virtual city tours, which may be useful for political organizations that are located in one area. For example, you may be helping out the Governor of Illinois. In that case, users might want to come to the website to get a feel for how the state is being run. Regardless of the type of political organization you run, the City Government WordPress theme is a viable option.
Politicize
The Politicize theme is appropriately named because it was designed for political parties and politicians looking for a sleek and professional website to front their cause. It comes with all the features you’d need to launch a successful political blog or website. You’ll be able to collect donations, collect emails, manage your events, share your biography, and much more.
In addition, the template includes social media integration, slideshows and carousels for highlighting your photos, multiple galleries, 5 header styles and unlimited color schemes for branding purposes.
Activism
The Activism theme provides a clean and modern solution for political activity. It comes with an events plugin, donation buttons, image sliders, a testimonials section to help build your credibility, a team section, and a beautiful gallery to showcase your photos.
Besides, this template is multilingual so you can easily translate it into different languages, and it includes social icons so people can easily follow you and help spread your message. Other theme features include a drag-and-drop page builder, responsive and Retina-Ready, and the option for a one-page or a multi-page website.
Kause
Kause is a flexible WordPress theme with the useful tools for a political campaign website. It comes with the ability to fundraise and collect donations, an email subscription module to collect emails, large and attractive image slideshows, and social media integration to make it easy for people to follow you and share your messages.
In addition, the Kause theme supports audio and video, and is translation ready so you can easily reach people in different languages. It also features an online shop if you’d like to sell merchandise and a drag-and-drop page builder to easily create custom page layouts without coding.
The Cause
With a clean and professional design, a donations module, an events manager, beautiful image slideshows, an email subscriptions function, social media integration, and a simple blog section to share your stories, the Cause WordPress theme offers a top-notch solution for political organizations. Use it to build your authority, solicit votes and expedite your political success.
To save you time, the template comes with over 20 ready made page templates and 6 custom post types for different purposes. It also includes custom widgets to easily add more features, video support, and a contact form so that people can easily get in touch with you or your team.
Republican Theme
We have removed this review becuase this theme is discontinued.
Democrat Theme
We have removed this review becuase this theme is discontinued.
Libertarian Theme
We have removed this review becuase this theme is discontinued.
mike ahuja
March 11, 2016 at 12:02 amomg so many to choose from…i like many of these…i need to decide on some for a judge campaign…oy vey
Sarah Bishop
September 4, 2016 at 2:56 pmHey Mike,
There are so many good ones out there, how do you decide? What themes did you narrow it down to? Let me know if you need any help.
Boby
November 27, 2016 at 4:11 amThank you for writing this article
Sarah Bishop
November 28, 2016 at 10:47 pmIt’s our pleasure, glad you found the information useful.