The Timeline of Presidential Elections
The Timeline of Presidential Elections

Author: Robert S. Erikson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-08-24

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0226922162

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In presidential elections, do voters cast their ballots for the candidates whose platform and positions best match their own? Or is the race for president of the United States come down largely to who runs the most effective campaign? It’s a question those who study elections have been considering for years with no clear resolution. In The Timeline of Presidential Elections, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien reveal for the first time how both factors come into play. Erikson and Wlezien have amassed data from close to two thousand national polls covering every presidential election from 1952 to 2008, allowing them to see how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. Polls from the beginning of the year, they show, have virtually no predictive power. By mid-April, when the candidates have been identified and matched in pollsters’ trial heats, preferences have come into focus—and predicted the winner in eleven of the fifteen elections. But a similar process of forming favorites takes place in the last six months, during which voters’ intentions change only gradually, with particular events—including presidential debates—rarely resulting in dramatic change. Ultimately, Erikson and Wlezien show that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of—or not made aware of—fundamental factors like candidates’ policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. Timely and compelling, this book will force us to rethink our assumptions about presidential elections.

Gilded Age Cato
Gilded Age Cato

Author: Charles W. Calhoun

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0813161797

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Union general, federal judge, presidential contender, and cabinet officer—Walter Q. Gresham of Indiana stands as an enigmatic character in the politics of the Gilded Age, one who never seemed comfortable in the offices he sought. This first scholarly biography not only follows the turns of his career but seeks also to find the roots of his disaffection. Entering politics as a Whig, Gresham shortly turned to help organize the new Republican Party and was a contender for its presidential nomination in the 1880s. But he became popular with labor and with the Populists and closed his political career by serving as secretary of state under Grover Cleveland. In reviewing Gresham's conduct of foreign affairs, Charles W. Calhoun disputes the widely held view that he was an economic expansionist who paved the way for imperialism. Gresham, instead, is seen here as a traditionalist who tried to steer the country away from entanglements abroad. It is this traditionalism that Calhoun finds to be the clue to Gresham's career. Troubled with self-doubt, Gresham, like the Cato of old, sought strength in a return to the republican virtues of the Revolutionary generation. Based on a thorough use of the available resources, this will stand as the definitive biography of an important figure in American political and diplomatic history, and in its portrayal of a man out of step with his times it sheds a different light on the politics of the Gilded Age.

The American Campaign, Second Edition
The American Campaign, Second Edition

Author: James E. Campbell

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1603444475

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Reporting data and predicting trends through the 2008 campaign, this classroom-tested volume offers again James E. Campbell's "theory of the predictable campaign," incorporating the fundamental conditions that systematically affect the presidential vote: political competition, presidential incumbency, and election-year economic conditions. Campbell's cogent thinking and clear style present students with a readable survey of presidential elections and political scientists' ways of studying them. The American Campaign also shows how and why journalists have mistakenly assigned a pattern of unpredictability and critical significance to the vagaries of individual campaigns. This excellent election-year text provides:a summary and assessment of each of the serious predictive models of presidential election outcomes;a historical summary of many of America's important presidential elections;a significant new contribution to the understanding of presidential campaigns and how they matter.

Campaigns and Elections American Style
Campaigns and Elections American Style

Author: James A. Thurber

Publisher:

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9780429468278

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Following one of the most contentious and surprising elections in US history, the new edition of this classic text demonstrates unequivocally: Campaigns matter. With new and revised chapters throughout, Campaigns and Elections American Style provides a real education in contemporary campaign politics. In the fifth edition, academics and campaign professionals explain how Trump won the presidency, comparing his sometimes novel tactics with tried and true strategies including how campaign themes and strategies are developed and communicated, the changes in campaign tactics as a result of changing technology, new techniques to target and mobilize voters, the evolving landscape of campaign finance and election laws, and the increasing diversity of the role of media in elections. Offering a unique and careful mix of Democrat and Republican, academic and practitioner, and male and female campaign perspectives, this volume scrutinizes national and local-level campaigns with a special focus on the 2016 presidential and congressional elections and what those elections might tell us about 2018 and 2020. Students, citizens, candidates, and campaign managers will learn not only how to win elections but also why it is imperative to do so in an ethical way. Perfect for a variety of courses in American government, this book is essential reading for political junkies of any stripe and serious students of campaigns and elections. Highlights of the Fifth Edition Covers the 2016 elections with an eye to 2018 and 2020. Explains how Trump won the presidency, the changes in campaign tactics as a result of changing technology, new techniques to target and mobilize voters, the evolving landscape of campaign finance and election laws, and the increasing diversity of the role of media. Includes a new part structure and the addition of part introductions to help students contextualize the major issues and trends in campaigns and elections.

Jockeying for the American Presidency
Jockeying for the American Presidency

Author: Lara M. Brown

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1604977027

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"This book will compel scholars to take a new look at the role of "political opportunism" in the presidential selection process. Lara Brown provides a fresh, innovative exploration of the roots of opportunism, one that challenges conventional wisdom as it advances our understanding of this complex topic."--Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount University.

The First Presidential Contest
The First Presidential Contest

Author: Jeffrey L. Pasley

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2016-12-04

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0700623515

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This is the first study in half a century to focus on the election of 1796. At first glance, the first presidential contest looks unfamiliar—parties were frowned upon, there was no national vote, and the candidates did not even participate (the political mores of the day forbade it). Yet for all that, Jeffrey L. Pasley contends, the election of 1796 was “absolutely seminal,” setting the stage for all of American politics to follow. Challenging much of the conventional understanding of this election, Pasley argues that Federalist and Democratic-Republican were deeply meaningful categories for politicians and citizens of the 1790s, even if the names could be inconsistent and the institutional presence lacking. He treats the 1796 election as a rough draft of the democratic presidential campaigns that came later rather than as the personal squabble depicted by other historians. It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two extremes of American politics, and it established the basic ideological dynamic of a liberal, rights-spreading American left arrayed against a conservative, society-protecting right, each with its own competing model of leadership. Rather than the inner thoughts and personal lives of the Founders, covered in so many other volumes, Pasley focuses on images of Adams and Jefferson created by supporters-and detractors-through the press, capturing the way that ordinary citizens in 1796 would have actually experienced candidates they never heard speak. Newspaper editors, minor officials, now forgotten congressman, and individual elector candidates all take a leading role in the story to show how politics of the day actually worked. Pasley's cogent study rescues the election of 1796 from the shadow of 1800 and invites us to rethink how we view that campaign and the origins of American politics.

By One Vote
By One Vote

Author: Michael Fitzgibbon Holt

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13:

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A fresh interpretation of the disputed presidential election of 1876 between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden, which was characterized by allegations of election fraud and a narrow victory by a single electoral vote. Many historians consider this election the precursor to the bitterly divisive 2000 Bush-Gore election.