Covering the beginning of the television era to the present, Battleground provides an unprecedented look at the Electoral College strategies used by US presidential campaigns from 1952 to 2020 and what difference they make on election day.
Although US presidential campaigns are among the most closely followed events in the world, academic research tends to conclude that they are much less important for shaping election-day outcomes than broader economic conditions and more gradual socio-political trends. If so, then what campaigners do and say might be entertaining, but should rarely have a decisive influence on who wins the White House. Yet because academic studies typically treat presidential elections as singular events, there is surprisingly little research that considers the strategies that parties pursue in presidential campaigning across multiple election years, how those strategies have evolved over time, or what difference those strategies might make on election day.
Drawing on internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020, Battleground identifies the Electoral College strategies for every major presidential campaign in the modern era, assesses how well they executed their plans, and illuminates what difference their state-by-state allocation of candidate visits and television spending made on election day. From Eisenhower to Trump, Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus, and Costas Panagopoulos show how battleground states have been selected and contested, and why campaign strategies are important for shaping Electoral College outcomes. They find that presidential campaigns in the modern era have been consistently strategic, sophisticated, and effective. As a result, campaign strategies can still be pivotal for shaping Electoral College outcomes, even if their influence looks somewhat different today than in 1952. Battleground provides readers with a sophisticated yet straightforward look at how (and how much) presidential campaigns affect the selection of the most powerful person in the world.
Industry Reviews
"In Battleground, Shaw, Althaus, and Panagopoulos trace the evolution of presidential campaigns from 1952 through 2020, with an eye toward how Electoral College expectations influence the allocation of campaign resources. They show how campaigns have increasingly focused media spending and candidate visits on states thought to be crucial battlegrounds where the Electoral College outcome would supposedly pivot. Did media spending and candidate visits
matter? The research suggests the answer is yes. Battleground is an easily accessible resource - for students, academics, political practitioners, or anyone who is interested in US presidential elections." --
Robert S. Erikson, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
"Three of the brightest minds in political science have written the penultimate book for election junkies-a tour de force of the strategies of the last nearly seventy years of presidential campaigns. They have charted the evolving nature of these contests as technology, culture, and demography have changed America and its politics. They've drawn on the animating documents of these efforts to illuminate the different ways in which campaigns for the Oval Office
have been run. Read, enjoy, and be enlightened by academics who understand intimately the practice of our country's politics at its highest level, namely in races for the White House." -- Karl Rove,
Former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush
"For better or worse, the Electoral College framework dictates how presidential campaigns must think about electoral strategy and resource allocation. Readers will be hard-pressed to find a better study of how campaigns have navigated this terrain since the 1950s. The research, writing, and analyses in this book are all first-rate. The authors bring presidential campaigns to life so vividly that you almost miss the superb social science weaved throughout. You
are sure to learn a great deal about modern-era races for the White House-even if they were your own!" -- Michael S. Dukakis, Former Massachusetts Governor and 1988 Democratic Presidential Nominee
"This is a sweeping and indispensable analysis, written in a very engaging style. The first several chapters are fully accessible to the general reader interested in presidential election history." -- A. Siaroff, Choice
