"To hear it from popular accounts of recent American presidential campaigns, strategy and execution are key when it comes to winning elections. In the aftermath of these elections, detailed reportage documents the key decisions that led one campaign to triumph over the other. Losers are scorned, legends are born. Academic studies of the same campaigns tell a vastly different story: In these accounts, neither strategy nor execution matters much because the vote is largely determined by fundamentals like the state of the economy and the current popularity of the incumbent president. This book charts a middle course between the journalistic Scylla and the academic Charbydis: We show how and why strategies as well as execution can contribute to success in presidential elections, but also how they have been evolving over the last 70 years in systematic ways that make presidential campaigning in the early 21st century quite different in purpose and payoff from the way it looked in the mid-20th century. Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke may have been right when he said in 1871 that, "no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces." But we"--
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.
Drawing on internal campaign records and novel data sources, 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, the book shows how battleground states have been selected and contested, and why campaign strategies are important for shaping Electoral College outcomes. 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.
