This revised edition (updated for the 2024 election) explains American presidential campaigns and includes stickers, activities, and a color-your-own Electoral Map! Who can run for president? What are the differences between America's two major political parties? Is the Electoral College really a college? The newly updated What Is a Presidential Election? answers these questions and many, many more. From stump speeches to campaign slogans, debates to nominating conventions, and finally to Election Night and Inauguration Day, readers will learn all about what it takes to run for--and win--the most powerful job on earth. Activities throughout prompt readers to think about the issues they care most about and consider what makes a good president, sparking discussion with friends and family. Includes a sheet of presidential bobblehead stickers and a color-your-own Electoral Map for the upcoming 2024 election!

In presidential elections, do voters cast their ballots for the candidates whose platform and positions best match their own? Or is the race for president of the United States come down largely to who runs the most effective campaign? It’s a question those who study elections have been considering for years with no clear resolution. In The Timeline of Presidential Elections, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien reveal for the first time how both factors come into play. Erikson and Wlezien have amassed data from close to two thousand national polls covering every presidential election from 1952 to 2008, allowing them to see how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. Polls from the beginning of the year, they show, have virtually no predictive power. By mid-April, when the candidates have been identified and matched in pollsters’ trial heats, preferences have come into focus—and predicted the winner in eleven of the fifteen elections. But a similar process of forming favorites takes place in the last six months, during which voters’ intentions change only gradually, with particular events—including presidential debates—rarely resulting in dramatic change. Ultimately, Erikson and Wlezien show that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of—or not made aware of—fundamental factors like candidates’ policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. Timely and compelling, this book will force us to rethink our assumptions about presidential elections.

This reference work provides complete returns for the presidential elections by state and county for the period 1788 to 1860. Available nowhere else in one volume, this information has been pieced together through years of research of original sources of many kinds. The election returns include each candidate's name, party, number of votes and percentage of votes. Explanatory footnotes and source information accompany the returns, as well as maps that show presidential election districts for those states and elections when presidential elections were so conducted. Also included are a history of voting for presidential electors and the influence of political parties on the electors, as well as listings of election dates, county names (past and present), party abbreviations used in the book, and counties created following each state's first popular election of electors.

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.

In his latest book, Presidential Elections and Majority Rule, Edward Foley asks how the American electoral system can better represent the people. What kind of winner truly reflects the nation's votes: the plurality winners of winner-takes-all elections, as currently used, or the majority-preferred winners of a reformed system? How do third-party candidates affect American presidential elections? What, if anything, would change in a two-candidate run-off?And how can electoral reform be implemented without sowing chaos? Ultimately, Foley outlines a solution in which the Electoral College can be restored to its original majoritarian ideals through state law rather than Constitutional amendment.