Costas Panagopoulos, Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Although American 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, surprisingly little research considers the entire universe of recent presidential elections. And because each campaign is presumed to follow only one strategy, single-election studies have surprisingly little to say about what relative difference those strategies might make on election day.
This book aims to fill this gap. Drawing on internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020, it identifies the Electoral College strategies for every major presidential campaign in the modern era, assesses how well those plans were executed, and illuminates what difference state-by-state allocations of candidate visits and television spending made on election day. Through this unusual perspective the book identifies broader contextual changes that define and divide these eighteen elections into three distinct eras. It shows how battleground states have been selected and contested in each of these eras and finds that presidential campaigns in the modern era have been consistently strategic, sophisticated, and effective. The book concludes that campaign strategies can still be pivotal for shaping Electoral College outcomes, even if their influence today looks somewhat different than in 1952.
