Description
Book SynopsisCovering 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
