In that Fall Semester that I took Campaign and Elections, I found my love of electoral strategy. The American electoral process is a unique thing. Our national leader is not elected by a popular vote of the people - the Founding Father took it one step away from them by implementing the Electoral College. So in reality, you don't simply focus on getting 51% of the vote in the country. Instead, you focus on 50 separate contests where you want to get 51% of the vote. And each of those different contests look just ever so different from the next.
This book is the final piece to my completely balanced election reading. This one was written by one of Bush's advisers for his 2000 & 2004 elections. But this book was an academic view point. It felt like being in school again, reading articles and chapters. I actually *was supposed to* read a chapter of this book for my class, and used it again on a paper the next semester. It is interesting to read because for the first time, a campaign strategist actually laid out the campaign's electoral strategy. Not just the basic, 'we're going after the Latino vote'. But it actually laid out their state thinking, what states were Red, slightly Red, Battleground, slightly Blue, and Blue.
Strategy is what interests me, so actually getting an insider's view of what it actually looked like was really interesting. It was an academic book, so it was dense and full of jargon/statistics. I had to pull out my PLSC 321 knowledge, which I had forever banished to the completely useless part of my brain.
Final Score: 4 out of 5 stars
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