Download or read book Why Iowa written by David P. Redlawsk and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Barack Obama had not won in Iowa, most commentators believe that he would not have been able to go on to capture the Democratic nomination for president. Why Iowa? offers the definitive account of those early weeks of the campaign season: from how the Iowa caucuses work and what motivates the candidates’ campaigns, to participation and turnout, as well as the lingering effects that the campaigning had on Iowa voters. Demonstrating how “what happens in Iowa” truly reverberates throughout the country, five-time Iowa precinct caucus chair David P. Redlawsk and his coauthors take us on an inside tour of one of the most media-saturated and speculated-about campaign events in American politics. Considering whether a sequential primary system, in which early, smaller states such as Iowa and New Hampshire have such a tremendous impact is fair or beneficial to the country as a whole, the authors here demonstrate that not only is the impact warranted, but it also reveals a great deal about informational elements of the campaigns. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this sequential system does confer huge benefits on the nominating process while Iowa’s particularly well-designed caucus system—extensively explored here for the first time—brings candidates’ arguments, strengths, and weaknesses into the open and under the media’s lens.
Download or read book The Iowa Precinct Caucuses written by Hugh Winebrenner and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although some people refer to Iowa as “flyover country,” presidential candidates and political reporters in the national press corps have no difficulty locating the state every four years at the beginning of presidential primary season. When Iowa Democrats pushed forward their precinct caucuses in 1972, the Iowa caucuses became the first presidential nominating event in the nation. Politicos soon realized the impact of Iowa’s new status and, along with the national media, promoted the caucuses with a vengeance. The Iowa Precinct Caucuses chronicles how the caucuses began, how they changed, and starting in 1972 how they became fodder for and manipulated by the mass media. Hugh Winebrenner and Dennis J. Goldford argue that the media have given a value to the Iowa caucuses completely out of proportion to the reality of their purpose and procedural methods. In fact, the nationally reported “results” are contrived by the Iowa parties to portray a distorted picture of the process. As presidential primaries have grown in the media spotlight and superseded the parties’ conventions, Iowa has become a political proving ground for the confident, the hopeful, and the relatively unknown, but at what cost to the country? The third edition of this classic book has been updated to include the elections of 2000, which saw the first winner of the Iowa caucuses to reach the White House since 1976; of 2004 and the roller-coaster fortunes of Howard Dean and John Kerry; and of 2008 and the unlikely emergence of Barack Obama as a presidential contender.
Download or read book Grassroots Rules written by Christopher C. Hull and published by Stanford Law & Politics. This book was released on 2008 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why Iowa? After all, in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential primary, both Iowa and New Hampshire have come under significant fire - as usual. Critics such as Sen. Carl Levin [D-Mich] have charged that these early contests dominate the nomination process, yet are badly out of step with the ideology and demographics of the party and the country writ large. However, white New Hampshire has suffered a serious setback, Iowa has once again emerged as the first presidential primary contest, in part by arguing that its Precinct Caucus is a time-honored tradition that helped winnow the field with good old retail politicking and grassroots activism.".
Download or read book American Carnage written by Tim Alberta and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 891 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller “Not a conventional Trump-era book. It is less about the daily mayhem in the White House than about the unprecedented capitulation of a political party. This book will endure for helping us understand not what is happening but why it happened…. [An] indispensable work.”—Washington Post Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: they had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural identity, lit a fire under the right. Republicans regained power in Congress but spent that time fighting among themselves. With these struggles weakening the party’s defenses, and with more and more Americans losing faith in the political class, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to launch his campaign in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. Loaded with explosive original reporting and based on hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of a political era.
Download or read book Campaign Inc written by Henry F. De Sio., Jr. and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes more than an excellent candidate to win elections; it takes an outstanding campaign organization, too. Campaign Inc. is the story of how leadership and organization propelled Barack Obama to the White House. As the chief operating officer of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Henry F. De Sio, Jr., was positioned to view this historic campaign as few others could. In this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, he whisks readers into Obama’s national election headquarters in Chicago to glimpse the decision-making processes and myriad details critical to running a successful and innovative presidential campaign. From the campaign’s early chaos to the jubilation and drama of winning the Iowa caucus, to the drawn-out Democratic nomination process, to Obama’s eventual election as president of the United States, De Sio guides readers through the challenges faced by the Obama for America campaign in its brief twenty-one-month lifespan. De Sio shows readers that Obama himself was direct about his vision for the campaign when he instructed his staff to “run it like a business.” Thus, this is less the story of Barack Obama, candidate, and more the story of Barack Obama, CEO. Because campaigns are launched from scratch during every election cycle, they are the ultimate entrepreneurial experience. In the course of the election, the Obama campaign scaled up from a scrappy start-up to a nearly $1 billion operation, becoming a hothouse environment on which the glare of the media spotlight was permanently trained. Campaign Inc. allows readers to peek behind the curtain at the underdog organization that brought down the Clinton campaign and later went on to defeat the Republican machine, while offering lessons in leadership and organization to innovators, executives, and entrepreneurs.
Download or read book The Iowa Precinct Caucuses written by Hugh Winebrenner and published by Ames : Iowa State University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once an obscure regional affair, the Iowa precinct caucuses have become political olympics, of make-or-break importance to presidential candidates every four years. How this transformation came about -- and what it means to state and national politics -- is the subject of this book, a penetrating look into the role of the media in the American electoral process. Ground breaking when it was first published in 1987, Iowa Precinct Caucuses has been extensively updated, expanded and revised in this second edition to reflect the profound, rapid changes that mark American politics.
Download or read book Primary Politics written by Elaine C. Kamarck and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores one of the most important questions in American politics--how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years. Focuses on how presidential candidates have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Election Meltdown written by Richard L. Hasen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the nation’s leading expert, an indispensable analysis of key threats to the integrity of the 2020 American presidential election As the 2020 presidential campaign begins to take shape, there is widespread distrust of the fairness and accuracy of American elections. In this timely and accessible book, Richard L. Hasen uses riveting stories illustrating four factors increasing the mistrust. Voter suppression has escalated as a Republican tool aimed to depress turnout of likely Democratic voters, fueling suspicion. Pockets of incompetence in election administration, often in large cities controlled by Democrats, have created an opening to claims of unfairness. Old-fashioned and new-fangled dirty tricks, including foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns via social media, threaten electoral integrity. Inflammatory rhetoric about “stolen” elections supercharges distrust among hardcore partisans. Taking into account how each of these threats has manifested in recent years—most notably in the 2016 and 2018 elections—Hasen offers concrete steps that need to be taken to restore trust in American elections before the democratic process is completely undermined.
Download or read book Iowa Precinct Caucuses written by Hugh Winebrenner and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1998 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the role of the media in the American electoral process, focusing on Iowa as a prism on the national scene. The author examines the beginning of the precinct caucuses and the events which thrust them into the political spotlight in the early 1970s.
Download or read book Iowa History Reader written by Marvin Bergman and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1978 historian Joseph Wall wrote that Iowa was “still seeking to assert its own identity. . . . It has no real center where the elite of either power, wealth, or culture may congregate. Iowa, in short, is middle America.” In this collection of well-written and accessible essays, originally published in 1996, seventeen of the Hawkeye State’s most accomplished historians reflect upon the dramatic and not-so-dramatic shifts in the middle land’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marvin Bergman has drawn upon his years of editing the Annals of Iowa to gather contributors who cross disciplines, model the craft of writing a historical essay, cover more than one significant topic, and above all interpret history rather than recite it. In his preface to this new printing, he calls attention to publications that begin to fill the gaps noted in the 1996 edition. Rather than survey the basic facts, the essayists engage readers in the actual making of Iowa’s history by trying to understand the meaning of its past. By providing comprehensive accounts of topics in Iowa history that embrace the broader historiographical issues in American history, such as the nature of Progressivism and Populism, the debate over whether women’s expanded roles in wartime carried over to postwar periods, and the place of quantification in history, the essayists contribute substantially to debates at the national level at the same time that they interpret Iowa’s distinctive culture.
Download or read book Fight Club Politics written by Juliet Eilperin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The House of Representatives--the people's House--is supposed to most closely reflect the needs and desires of ordinary citizens. But over the past decade, House leaders fearful of losing power have torn the House from its roots. The creation of politically safe, more ideologically-tilted congressional districts through redistricting has cemented this shift and seated more politicians from both the extreme left and right. Fight Club Politics will show how we have come to the point where average Americans have little say over what happens in the House, and what can be done about it.
Download or read book Presidential Elections in the United States written by Kevin J. Coleman and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report describes the four stages of the presidential election process: the pre-nomination primaries and caucuses for selecting delegates to the national conventions; the national nominating conventions; the general election; and voting by members of the electoral college to choose the President and Vice President. The report will be updated again for the 2004 presidential election.
Download or read book Alienated America written by Timothy P. Carney and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a Washington Post bestseller. Respected conservative journalist and commentator Timothy P. Carney continues the conversation begun with Hillbilly Elegy and the classic Bowling Alone in this hard-hitting analysis that identifies the true factor behind the decline of the American dream: it is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including marriage, church, and civic life. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump proclaimed, “the American dream is dead,” and this message resonated across the country. Why do so many people believe that the American dream is no longer within reach? Growing inequality, stubborn pockets of immobility, rising rates of deadly addiction, the increasing and troubling fact that where you start determines where you end up, heightening political strife—these are the disturbing realities threatening ordinary American lives today. The standard accounts pointed to economic problems among the working class, but the root was a cultural collapse: While the educated and wealthy elites still enjoy strong communities, most blue-collar Americans lack strong communities and institutions that bind them to their neighbors. And outside of the elites, the central American institution has been religion That is, it’s not the factory closings that have torn us apart; it’s the church closings. The dissolution of our most cherished institutions—nuclear families, places of worship, civic organizations—has not only divided us, but eroded our sense of worth, belief in opportunity, and connection to one another. In Abandoned America, Carney visits all corners of America, from the dim country bars of Southwestern Pennsylvania., to the bustling Mormon wards of Salt Lake City, and explains the most important data and research to demonstrate how the social connection is the great divide in America. He shows that Trump’s surprising victory was the most visible symptom of this deep-seated problem. In addition to his detailed exploration of how a range of societal changes have, in tandem, damaged us, Carney provides a framework that will lead us back out of a lonely, modern wilderness.
Download or read book The 2020 Democratic Primary written by Luke Perry and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-08 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the outcome, dynamics, and lessons of the 2020 Democratic Primary. The authors examine how Joe Biden separated himself from a crowded field of candidates, the role that primary rules played in this process, the influence of gender and race on the primary campaign, new developments with the Iowa Caucuses and national party conventions, and what all this could mean for the 2024 election.
Download or read book Party Ballots Reform and the Transformation of America s Electoral System written by Erik J. Engstrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates that nineteenth-century electoral politics were the product of institutions that prescribed how votes were cast and were converted into political offices.
Download or read book Burning Down the House written by Julian E. Zelizer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book! A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The story of how Newt Gingrich and his allies tainted American politics, launching an enduring era of brutal partisan warfare When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama observed that Trump “is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party.” In Burning Down the House, historian Julian Zelizer pinpoints the moment when our country was set on a path toward an era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics, an era that was ignited by Newt Gingrich and his allies. In 1989, Gingrich brought down Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright and catapulted himself into the national spotlight. Perhaps more than any other politician, Gingrich introduced the rhetoric and tactics that have shaped Congress and the Republican Party for the last three decades. Elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich quickly became one of the most powerful figures in America not through innovative ideas or charisma, but through a calculated campaign of attacks against political opponents, casting himself as a savior in a fight of good versus evil. Taking office in the post-Watergate era, he weaponized the good government reforms newly introduced to fight corruption, wielding the rules in ways that shocked the legislators who had created them. His crusade against Democrats culminated in the plot to destroy the political career of Speaker Wright. While some of Gingrich’s fellow Republicans were disturbed by the viciousness of his attacks, party leaders enjoyed his successes so much that they did little collectively to stand in his way. Democrats, for their part, were alarmed, but did not want to sink to his level and took no effective actions to stop him. It didn’t seem to matter that Gingrich’s moral conservatism was hypocritical or that his methods were brazen, his accusations of corruption permanently tarnished his opponents. This brand of warfare worked, not as a strategy for governance but as a path to power, and what Gingrich planted, his fellow Republicans reaped. He led them to their first majority in Congress in decades, and his legacy extends far beyond his tenure in office. From the Contract with America to the rise of the Tea Party and the Trump presidential campaign, his fingerprints can be seen throughout some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics. Burning Down the House presents the alarming narrative of how Gingrich and his allies created a new normal in Washington.
Download or read book Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way written by Jeff Blodgett and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the 2008 presidential race dominates political discussion and media coverage worldwide, thousands of lesser-known local contests are being hard-fought in our neighborhoods, cities, and states. Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way is based on the work of Wellstone Action, a leading-edge progressive training center that has instructed thousands of political activists, campaign managers, and volunteers, of whom more than two hundred have gone on to run for office and win. Jeff Blodgett and Bill Lofy analyze the crucial lessons learned from many successful (and several losing) campaigns and demystifies what it takes to run for—and win—a political seat. This companion guide to Politics the Wellstone Way, the best-selling introduction to political action, features the in-depth knowledge that campaigns need to take energy and engagement to the next level—getting elected. With detailed and informative examples from progressive campaigns at every level throughout the United States, Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way combines grassroots organizing with political strategy, articulating a bold populist agenda. If you have ever considered volunteering for a political candidate, working for a campaign, or even running for public office yourself, Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way is the key resource you need to devise a sophisticated, progressive, and successful strategy and, ultimately, affect people’s lives for the better.
