Reporting data and predicting trends through the 2008 campaign, this classroom-tested volume offers again James E. Campbell’s “theory of the predictable campaign,” incorporating the fundamental conditions that systematically affect the presidential vote: political competition, presidential incumbency, and election-year economic conditions. Campbell’s cogent thinking and clear style present students with a readable survey of presidential elections and political scientists’ ways of studying them. The American Campaign also shows how and why journalists have mistakenly assigned a pattern of unpredictability and critical significance to the vagaries of individual campaigns. This excellent election-year text provides: a summary and assessment of each of the serious predictive models of presidential election outcomes; a historical summary of many of America’s important presidential elections; a significant new contribution to the understanding of presidential campaigns and how they matter.

Following one of the most contentious and surprising elections in US history, the new edition of this classic text demonstrates unequivocally: Campaigns matter. With new and revised chapters throughout, Campaigns and Elections American Style provides a real education in contemporary campaign politics. In the fifth edition, academics and campaign professionals explain how Trump won the presidency, comparing his sometimes novel tactics with tried and true strategies including how campaign themes and strategies are developed and communicated, the changes in campaign tactics as a result of changing technology, new techniques to target and mobilize voters, the evolving landscape of campaign finance and election laws, and the increasing diversity of the role of media in elections. Offering a unique and careful mix of Democrat and Republican, academic and practitioner, and male and female campaign perspectives, this volume scrutinizes national and local-level campaigns with a special focus on the 2016 presidential and congressional elections and what those elections might tell us about 2018 and 2020. Students, citizens, candidates, and campaign managers will learn not only how to win elections but also why it is imperative to do so in an ethical way. Perfect for a variety of courses in American government, this book is essential reading for political junkies of any stripe and serious students of campaigns and elections. Highlights of the Fifth Edition Covers the 2016 elections with an eye to 2018 and 2020. Explains how Trump won the presidency, the changes in campaign tactics as a result of changing technology, new techniques to target and mobilize voters, the evolving landscape of campaign finance and election laws, and the increasing diversity of the role of media. Includes a new part structure and the addition of part introductions to help students contextualize the major issues and trends in campaigns and elections.

Dramatic changes in political institutions and behavior over the past three decades have underscored the dynamic nature of American politics, confronting political scientists with a new and pressing intellectual agenda. The pioneering work of early postwar scholars, while laying a firm empirical foundation for contemporary scholarship, failed to consider how American politics might change or recognize the forces that would make fundamental change inevitable. In reassessing the static interpretations fostered by these classic studies, political scientists are now examining the underlying dynamics that generate transformational change. Transforming American Politics is a series that brings together texts addressing four closely related aspects of change. A first concern is documenting and explaining recent changes in American politics—in institutions, processes, behavior, and policymaking. A second is reinterpreting classic studies and theories to provide a more accurate perspective on postwar politics. The series looks at historical change to identify recurring patterns of political transformation within and across the distinctive eras of American politics. Last and perhaps most important, the series presents new theories and interpretations that explain the dynamic processes at work and thus clarify the direction of contemporary politics. All of the books focus on the central theme of transformation—transformation in both the conduct of American politics and in the way we study and understand its many aspects.

A Nation is Born Lexington, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Washington, Hamilton, Benedict Arnold. All familiar names, but how did they all fit together? How did merchants, lawyers, farmers, and cobblers come together to defeat the British Empire, its powerful navy, and its Hessian auxiliaries? For that matter, who were the Hessians, and what is an auxiliary? Bringing together ten eminent Revolutionary War experts, editor Ed Lengel presents their stirring narratives of the military campaigns that changed history and gave birth to a new nation. These historians guide you through the fateful decade of the 1770s in British America. In 1776, you battle in Brooklyn Heights, then cross the Delaware with Washington. In the late summer and fall of ’77, you bushwhack down the Champlain Valley with Johnny Burgoyne. You struggle through winter with Washington and his beleaguered troops in Valley Forge. When the spring of ’78 turns to summer, you endure the oppressive heat and the massive battle on New Jersey farmland at Monmouth Courthouse. In 1780 your journey takes you south into a bloody civil war—Tory versus patriot, neighbor versus neighbor in Georgia and the Carolinas. Finally, in ’81, you join the patriots as they maneuver north into Virginia, whereWashington and the French navy can trap the British on the Yorktown Peninsula. Complete with maps and suggested further reading, The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution is a short course in one of history’s most consequential wars, explaining how citizens became soldiers and how their dedication, determination, and force of will defeated the world’s greatest power and launched a nation like no other.

American national trade bibliography.

In the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville warned that "insufferable despotism" would prevail if America ever acquired a national administrative state. Today's Tea Partiers evidently believe that, after a great wrong turn in the early twentieth century, Tocqueville's nightmare has come true. In those years, it seems, a group of radicals, seduced by alien ideologies, created vast bureaucracies that continue to trample on individual freedom. In Tocqueville's Nightmare, Daniel R. Ernst destroys this ahistorical and simplistic narrative. He shows that, in fact, the nation's best corporate lawyers were among the creators of "commission government" that supporters were more interested in purging government of corruption than creating a socialist utopia, and that the principles of individual rights, limited government, and due process were built into the administrative state. Far from following "un-American" models, American state-builders rejected the leading European scheme for constraining government, the Rechtsstaat (a state of rules). Instead, they looked to an Anglo-American tradition that equated the rule of law with the rule of courts and counted on judges to review the bases for administrators' decisions. Soon, however, even judges realized that strict judicial review shifted to courts decisions best left to experts. The most masterful judges, including Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941, ultimately decided that a "day in court" was unnecessary if individuals had already had a "day in commission" where the fundamentals of due process and fair play prevailed. This procedural notion of the rule of law not only solved the judges' puzzle of reconciling bureaucracy and freedom. It also assured lawyers that their expertise in the ways of the courts would remain valuable, and professional politicians that presidents would not use administratively distributed largess as an independent source of political power. Tocqueville's nightmare has not come to pass. Instead, the American administrative state is a restrained and elegant solution to a thorny problem, and it remains in place to this day.

Election law plays a critical role in regulating the political arena at a time when Americans are witnessing unprecedented levels of polarization. The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law provides a comprehensive overview of the field, a survey of core themes, and summaries of the most pressing debates. Bringing together 47 leading scholars of election law, the Handbook offers readers a clearly written guide to aid navigation through this complex area, tackling controversial issues and situating them within the field's ongoing scholarly dialogue. Unparalleled in the breadth and depth of its coverage, The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners.