It’s no secret that politics is a game — one played with winners and losers. And in America, like it or not, the winner takes all. The name of the game? It’s all about getting 270 electoral votes. A new book from a Northeastern University political scientist provides a sweeping account of how the major party campaigns over the last seven decades have managed to strategically “deploy their precious resources” to put together a winning coalition toward that magic number.
“Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era,” is more than 20 years in the making, says Costas Panagopoulos, distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern University and co-author of the book published by Oxford University Press. “Step one was collecting this data and putting it together, which was no small task,” Panagopoulos tells Northeastern Global News. “Equally challenging was organizing the data in a way that allowed us to measure what we were studying consistently over time.”
