What does it take to win the White House? This book helps students understand both the issues and how and why people vote for one candidate. After discussing the dynamics of the primary campaigns, the authors examine three broad sets of issues that play a key role in voting: foreign policy, domestic policies, and the culture wars. This sets the foundations for an examination of regional similarities and differences in voting patterns, as the varying salience and valence of issues-whether general or specific-is explored across and within regions. Special attention is paid to battleground states. Drawing on concepts from political science, this book advances students' understanding both of the field and the phenomenon.

A month-by-month narrative of the 2008 presidential election leading up to Barack Obama's win in November 2008.

In The Way to Win, two of the country’s most accomplished political reporters explain what separates the victors from the victims in the unforgiving environment of modern presidential campaigns. Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, and John F. Harris, the national politics editor of The Washington Post, tell the story of how two families–the Bushes and the Clintons–have held the White House for nearly a generation and examine Hillary Clinton’s prospects for extending this record in 2008. Based on years of research, including private campaign memos and White House communications, The Way to Win reveals the surprising details of how the Bushes and Clintons have closely studied each the other’s successes and failures and used these lessons to shape their own strategies for winning elections and wielding power. In the case of George W. Bush, the strategic genius is Karl C. Rove, arguably the most influential White House aide in history. For the first time, Halperin and Harris cut through the myths and controversies surrounding Rove to illuminate in brilliant, behind-the-scenes detail what he actually does–his Trade Secrets for winning elections. In the case of the Clintons, the chief strategist is Bill Clinton himself. Drawing on their fifteen years reporting on and interviewing him, Halperin and Harris deconstruct and decipher the Clinton style, identifying the methods that all candidates can use in their pursuit of the White House. The Way to Win takes a lively and irreverent approach, but Halperin and Harris also show the disturbing ways that American politics has become a Freak Show–their name for a political culture that provides incentives for candidates, activists, interest groups, and the news media to emphasize ideological extremism and personal attack. For the first time, Halperin and Harris describe how Freak Show campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge forced Al Gore and John Kerry to lose control of their public images (with considerable help from the candidates’ own ineptitude) and lose the White House. On the brink of what will be one of the most intense, most exciting presidential elections in American history, The Way to Win is the book that armchair political junkies have been waiting for. Filled with peerless analysis and eye-opening revelations from the trenches, it is a must read for everyone who follows American politics.

This detailed overview and analysis of the results of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential win gives us the inside state-by-state guide to how Obama achieved his victory, and allows us to see where the country stood four years ago. Although much has changed in the nearly four years since, How Barack Obama Won remains the essential guide to Obama’s electoral strengths and offers important perspective on his 2012 bid. The votes in each state for Obama and McCain are broken down by percentage according to gender, age, race, party, religious affiliation, education, household income, size of city, and according to views about the most important issues (the economy, terrorism, Iraq, energy, healthcare), the future of the economy (worried, not worried) and the war in Iraq (approve, disapprove).

Communicator-in-Chief: How Barack Obama Used New Media Technology to Win the White House examines the fascinating and precedent-setting role new media technologies and the Internet played in the 2008 presidential campaign that allowed for the historic election of the nation's first African American president. It was the first presidential campaign in which the Internet, the electorate, and political campaign strategies for the White House successfully converged to propel a candidate to the highest elected office in the nation. The contributors to this volume masterfully demonstrate how the Internet is to President Barack Obama what television was to President John Kennedy, thus making Obama a truly twenty-first century communicator and politician. Furthermore, Communicator-in-Chief argues that Obama's 2008 campaign strategies established a model that all future campaigns must follow to achieve any measure of success. The Barack Obama campaign team astutely discovered how to communicate and motivate not only the general electorate but also the technology-addicted Millennial Generation - a generational voting block that will be a juggernaut in future elections.

"Trenchant commentary on the most stunning election of our time. Peeling back the layers of the political, social, and demographic trends that helped thrust Barack Obama into the Oval Office, the authors of this book toss aside conventional wisdom about 2008 and substitute thoughtful, deeper - and until now, ignored - interpretations of the events and environment that elected our new president" --publisher.

It's time the citizens of the United States take back America, and we all need to do our part. Winning the White House in 2008 is your essential guide to grassroots democracy. Political activist Vernon Lucas Albright provides strategies to win the White House in 2008 by exploring different ways to generate committed public service. Albright discusses grassroots campaign approaches designed for twenty-two battleground states and includes the Ten Basic Tenants needed to win elections. He also examines voter behavior, the grassroots potential of bipartisanship, political interest groups, and historical political strategies. With the wide availability of technology such as the Internet, cell phones, and personal computers, the average American citizen has the opportunity to be part of regional and nationwide movements. You can prevent the further decay of yeoman democracy; keep "town meeting America" from slipping further into history, and put America back in the hands of the people.

The gripping inside story of the 2008 presidential election, by two of the best political reporters in the country. “It’s one of the best books on politics of any kind I’ve read. For entertainment value, I put it up there with Catch 22.” —The Financial Times “It transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true….More interesting is what we learn about the candidates themselves: their frailties, egos and almost super-human stamina.” —The Financial Times “I can’t put down this book!” —Stephen Colbert Game Change is the New York Times bestselling story of the 2008 presidential election, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the best political reporters in the country. In the spirit of Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes and Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, this classic campaign trail book tells the defining story of a new era in American politics, going deeper behind the scenes of the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin campaigns than any other account of the historic 2008 election.

Race of a Lifetime- How Obama Won the White Houseis Published in the USA asGame Change- Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. The American presidential election of 2008 was as riveting a spectacle as modern politics has ever produced. The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton - and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama's partner and America's face to the world. The mercurial, at times erratic, performance of John McCain. The mesmerizing and bewildering emergence of Sarah Palin. In 2008, the battle for the White House became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told. Race of a Lifetime pulls back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns. How did Obama convince himself that, against enormous odds, he should be, and could be, the nation's first African-American president? How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape - and warp Hillary's supposedly unstoppable bid to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? What drove her husband's loss of composure and devastating political miscalculations? Why did McCain put the unknown, untested governor of Alaska on the Republican ticket? And was Palin merely as out of her depth as she appeared - or troubled in more unsettling ways? Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story and packed full of exclusive revelations, Race of a Lifetime answers those questions and more. Vivid and novelistic, fast-paced and character driven, this is a tour de force- an intimate, often hilarious, sometimes shocking portrait of the quest for power.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have background stories resplendent with courage and success-stories that highlight all that is best about America. In The Race for the White House 2008, author T.K. White looks at these two very different men and their quests for the highest office in the land. This is an insider's view of the Republican and Democratic strategies that have defined the 2008 campaigns and the role that political consultants have played in shaping politics and public policy. It is a case study of the troubles of the McCain campaign, the problems of its own making as well as those caused by forces beyond the campaign's control, including a deeply troubled economy that sharply drove up home foreclosures in many states. And it provides vivid evidence of the Obama campaign's success in using its money and organizational skills to put Republicans on the defensive in once-safe states. In this election, unlike so many others, the traditional pattern of focusing on the opponent and using underhanded methods has failed.This is a presidential campaign in which various forces including luck, natural political skill, the right-leaning slant of the country and political outmaneuvering have come together to form the most diverse and controversial campaign of our time. White's account provides an original narrative of the behind-the-scenes machinations of the past two years as well as the strategies, the causes and the consequences of The Race for the White House 2008.