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Guide to U.S. Elections 5th Edition 2 volumes (CQ Press) In Volume One, part one examines the evolution of the U.S. electoral system and includes material on the franchise and voting rights. It also explores the impact of major post–World War II political issues. Part two examines the evolution of campaign finance, traces the development of political parties, profiles major and minor parties, and discusses the historical significance of southern primaries. Part three features an overview and chronology of presidential elections along with information and data on presidential primaries, nominating conventions, popular and electoral voting, and the Electoral College.

In Volume Two, part four opens with an overview of Congress, followed by a history of elections for the House of Representatives, an examination of reapportionment and redistricting, and detailed general election returns for House races since 1824. Part four also includes a history of Senate elections, a list of senators and their dates of service since 1789, Senate general election returns since 1913, and Senate primary election returns since 1920. Part five presents a history of gubernatorial elections, a list of governors and their terms of service since 1776, gubernatorial general election returns since 1776, and gubernatorial primary election returns since 1919. Volume Two concludes with key reference materials, including primary documents and data tables, a selected bibliography, and six indexes for locating general or candidate-specific information.

Whether providing a basic overview of the electoral process or in-depth analysis of specific eras and issues, the Guide to U.S. Elections, fifth edition, offers an expansive account of every major aspect of federal and gubernatorial elections throughout U.S. history. Infused with new data, analysis, and an examination of issues relating to elections from 2001 to 2004, the Guide is as up-to-date as it is comprehensive. The fifth edition features state-by-state data on the 2002 and 2004 U.S. House and Senate races; the 2004 presidential election; 2001 to 2004 gubernatorial elections; and special elections, including the 2003 California recall highlights the electoral climate and contexts affecting the 2002 and 2004 elections, including the domestic policy issue of gay marriage and the foreign policy dilemma of the war in Iraq chronicles the 2004 presidential primary season, Democratic and Republican conventions, and the general election analyzes the impact of ongoing campaign finance reform efforts discusses reapportionment and redistricting, including the controversial mid-decade redistricting in Texas examines trends in voter turnout.

Revised and expanded by a team of expert writers and scholars, this renowned reference remains the definitive source for information on U.S. elections.

The fifth edition of CQ Press's Guide to U.S. Elections has been revised and expanded in many ways to provide readers a logical and more comprehensive explanation of voting—the fundamental act of self-government.

The editors of this new edition have retained numerous fea­tures and content from earlier editions, including multiple means of accessing information, such as through cross-reference page flags and several indexes. This edition also continues to empha­size the origins and development of U.S. elections at the federal and state levels as well as the rise of such important issues as cam­paign finance reform. Its historical background provides a frame­work for better understanding the comprehensive array of elec­tion returns that are the central feature of the Guide.

Part I: Elections in America. This section, added to the pre­vious edition, has been refined to provide readers a broad overview of the U.S. elections system. The introductory chapter, "The Evolution of American Elections," outlines the history of elections, with a particular emphasis on the last seventy years of the twentieth century. This chapter also includes a list of elec­tion milestones for the last two hundred years.

The second chapter, "Elections: An Expanding Franchise," discusses the long—and often slow—expansion of the franchise in the United States from a highly restricted right to vote in its earliest days to the universal voting privilege that exists today. Issues of voter participation have once again come to the fore with partisan deadlock during the 2000 elections and record high voter turnout in the 2004 contest.

Part II: Political Parties. First appearing in the previous edition, chapter 3 on campaign finance was developed to chron­icle the overriding importance—and influence—of campaign spending and contributions as they became the single most con­troversial aspect of U.S. elections at the end of the twentieth cen­tury. Substantially revised for 2005, this chapter highlights the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and its consequences, intended and otherwise. Chapter 4, "Politics and Issues, 1945­2004," helps readers to better understand the historical context in which elections since World War II have been held.

Chapter 5, "Political Party Development," has been substan­tially expanded and revised. In addition to providing a history of the evolution of parties, it examines party systems and addresses the question why two parties? Chapter 6, "Historical Profiles of American Political Parties," profiles all major and most minor parties, many of which no longer exist.

Part II also contains a chapter explaining the historical sig­nificance of southern primaries, which wielded a dispropor­tionate impact upon the American electoral process during much of the twentieth century.

Part III: Presidential Elections. This section reviews all U.S. presidential races and includes a detailed elections chronology, nominating convention highlights and platforms, electoral col­lege results (with accompanying maps), and popular vote re­turns for primaries and general elections.

Part IV: Congressional Elections. This section highlights election returns for the House and Senate. The election data are supported by chapters explaining the history and evolution of voting for members of the legislative branch of government. Part 4 also includes a chapter on the history of reapportionment and redistricting, the historically decennial process that realigns representation in the House after every census. New to this edi­tion is a discussion of the unprecedented "mid-decade" redis­tricting in Texas. Also new is an examination of the way that population location, growth, and decline have affected the allo­cation of House seats throughout U.S. history.

Part V: Gubernatorial Elections. This section follows the pattern of the previous sections with a detailed listing of general and primary returns for the election of governors, supported by a chapter discussing gubernatorial history. It highlights the 2003 recall of California governor Gray Davis and the election of his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On November 2, 2004, candidates and their staffs were ready for an election as unusual as that of moo. Lawyers and pollwatchers were prepared to file suits and con­tinue fighting the election through legal briefs and affidavits un­til the Supreme Court decided the winner in December. How­ever, after John Kerry conceded the critical state of Ohio, which George W. Bush won by 118,601 votes, the troops had to go home and accept that the presidential election of 2004 was decided in the normal way, after the votes were counted on election night.

To recognize that this presidential election was different from that four years earlier is not proof that it was normal. To winning and losing candidates, each election is unique, and breathless insider accounts of a campaign will focus on the here and now rather than on enduring features of the American elec­toral system. An election can only be described as normal if its key features are typical of contests in preceding decades.

The most normal feature in the 2004 presidential race was that the candidate with the most votes won. This has been the case in every presidential election since 1892, except that of George W. Bush's first-term victory. Thanks to an expanding American population, the 62,040,610 votes cast for Bush was the highest number ever won by a presidential candidate. His 51 percent share of the popular vote was close to the average win­ning share of 52 percent in presidential elections since 1948. Bush is representative of post–World War II winners in another respect: In six elections the winner has received less than half the vote and, in eight elections, an absolute majority. Unlike Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, who each won two contests with an absolute majority of the vote, and unlike Bill Clinton, who was twice victorious with just under half the vote, George W. Bush emerged once with less than half the vote and once with an absolute majority.

Presidential elections are held under winner-take-all rules, for it is impossible to share a single office between two or more candidates according to their share of the popular vote. Propor­tional representation, therefore, can only be achieved in a multi­member election, such as the election of hundreds of members of a legislature. The result of winner-take-all is, obviously, that the loser gets nothing. The winner's claim to be president of all the people is constitutionally correct, but after a hard and some­times bitter contest, it may be insufficient to console many of them, such as the 59,028,439 who voted for John Kerry or the 39,103,882 who voted for the forty-first president, George H. W. Bush, when he was defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992.

The relatively narrow margin of victory for Bush in 2004 is proof that the election was competitive, a necessary condition of democratic elections. It contrasts favorably with the 2004 Rus­sian presidential election, in which Vladimir Putin demonstrated his influence on the media, as well as his popularity, by winning 71 percent of the vote. It contrasts even more favorably with presidential elections held in "facade" democracies that for the incumbent produce 99 percent of the vote, a result literally and figuratively too good to be true.

Although the two-party system in the United States is strong, this idealized norm has repeatedly been breached by protest can­didates, such as Ross Perot, or candidates, such as Strom Thur­mond or John Anderson, who lead a breakaway movement from one of the two parties. Three or more candidates on the ballot remove the certainty of the winner receiving half the popular vote. In 1992 Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43 percent of the vote against 37 percent for President George H. W. Bush be­cause Ross Perot took almost 19 percent of the popular vote. In 2000 supporters of Albert Gore blamed Ralph Nader for losing the Democrats the election, as Nader took 2,882,738 votes na­tionwide. The perceived closeness of the race in 2004 discour­aged potential Nader supporters; in 15 states his name was not on the ballot, or he could only receive write-in votes. Nader's to­tal vote in 2004 thus dropped to 465,650. In consequence, the candidates of the two major parties won 99 percent of the popu­lar vote, the highest total since 1988, when the elder Bush and Michael Dukakis together gained the same share.

Since the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, a series of federal and state laws have made it easier for people to register to vote. The closeness of the 2000 race encouraged parties and civic groups to increase turnout in 2004, and media focus on the fact that every vote could count provided an added stimulus. In many states, there are indications of "over-registration," because the names of people who had moved away or died were not re­moved from the list of registered electors. In Alaska and Maine, for example, the number of people listed as registered voters ex­ceeded the voting-age population. The nationwide turnout in 2004 was 60.7 percent of the estimated population of voting age, 8.5 points higher than in 2000 and the highest since 1968. Turnout rose more than the average in the most competitive states and less than average in the dozen least competitive states. For example, in hard fought Ohio, turnout was 55.8 per­cent of the voting-age population in 2000 and 66.3 percent in

2004.

The proportion of the voting-age population registered to vote has risen to 85.6 percent nationwide, compared to 77.3 per­cent in 2000. This figure remains below the proportion of the electorate registered in European democracies. Efforts to achieve virtually too percent registration face major obstacles. Unlike some European countries, the United States has no requirement for every citizen to have a national identity card; a social secu­rity card does not contain photo identification, and drivers' li­censes, like voter registration, are a state, not a federal, responsi­bility. Equally important, many registered voters do not actually vote. In the 2004 election, three in every ten registered electors did not cast a vote.

While the outcome of the presidential race often dominates election reporting, a bigger book is needed to tell the full story of what has happened when Americans go to the polls. Compet­itive elections have been held for more than two centuries, and the vote for the presidency is not the only vote that Americans cast: more than 45o federal offices, including representatives and senators, are contested on the first Tuesday after the first Mon­day in November, and races for governorships and other state and local posts push into the thousands the total number of people elected in one day.

The fifth edition of the splendid Guide to U.S. Elections is welcome, for it adds new features as well as updates the previous edition, which concluded with the 2000 election. For example, the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act has altered campaign financing and funding, so this edition expands substantially the discussion of campaign finance to match increased spending and regulation. New features build on decades of authoritative work on American elections by CQ Press staff and their associ­ates. The fifth edition makes good use of their expertise in pre­senting complex information clearly in both prose and in tables.

Part one, "Elections in America," is valuable in showing how the constitutional framework of a separately elected chief execu­tive and legislature has survived for centuries through a process of adaptation. It also shows that while the United States has the oldest continuous history of competitive elections, for more than half this period elections were far from democratic. Ini­tially, the right to vote was restricted to adult white males with property, and some states followed English practice of the pe­riod by not allowing Catholics or Jews to vote. In the nineteenth century, the right to vote was granted to a large majority of white males. Between the Civil War and World War I, some states allowed African Americans and women the vote, but the right to vote was not guaranteed women until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. There was no federal guarantee of the right to vote for African Ameri­cans until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

At a time when the significance of political parties is being questioned by single-issue advocacy groups, and television turns politicians into personalities, the discussion of the devel­opment of American political parties is particularly important. Part two emphasizes the institutional roots of partisanship in the U.S. political system, notwithstanding the fact that the Founding Fathers did not expect elections to be fought by par­ties and the word "party" was a term of abuse. In the 182os elec­toral competition between two parties emerged, and by 1848 the presidency was contested by three parties. In the 1860 election, which immediately preceded the outbreak of the Civil War, the candidates of four parties, including the recently formed Re­publican Party of Abraham Lincoln, won at least 12 percent of the popular vote and electoral college votes. Competition be­tween Republicans and Democrats for the White House finally emerged after the Civil War.

Chapter 6, profiling political parties, throws light on what is obscured by the assertion that the United States has a two-party system. Third parties have not won the White House or many seats in Congress but their interventions have sometimes deter­mined which of the two leading parties won and forced changes in their positions. A separate chapter on the Democratic pri­maries in the South explains how that institution was used to maintain a system of racially biased competition in which whites could vote but blacks could not until the federal courts and Congress guaranteed the right of people of all races to vote.

Although presidential races are often turned into personality contests, they are also about issues. The 2004 presidential races featured competing appeals for votes on the grounds of moral values, fundamentalist or liberal, how to conduct a war against terrorism, and the state of the nation's economy and health care. Chapter 4 shows that the appeal to issues is nothing new in American politics. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson won elections emphasizing expansive social programs financed through taxation, while other Democratic candidates have lost on these same issues. Ronald Reagan campaigned against big government and won two elections, while Barry Goldwater took a similar position and was buried in a landslide by Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society program. The Vietnam War is a reminder that the commitment of American troops to battle overseas has long fostered political debate.

Presidential candidates may appeal to voters as personalities, but they owe their place on the ballot to the party that nomi­nates them. Chapters in part three document the changing path to securing the nomination. From the launch of party politics until the mid-twentieth century, national conventions of party bosses decided who would be the Democratic and Republican candidates; full facts and figures are given for each convention. Since then, primaries have become critical in deciding who the nominees will be. The transitory nature of primaries, which eliminate many candidates, makes it difficult to trace informa­tion in later years. Primaries are held at different times and by different rules in different states, and the Guide offer an indis­pensable and comprehensive source of information about the changing practice of primaries and how they work today.

What voters do with their ballot is only the start in deciding how an election is won and lost. After votes are totalled, mem­bers of the Electoral College cast votes in each of the 50 states, and it is this vote that decides the presidency. The Guide docu­ments how this process is intended to work. It also documents what happens when things do not work smoothly, as happened in the 2000 presidential election and after the election of 1876, when the House of Representatives decided the outcome in de­fault of the Electoral College.

Electing a president is only one part of a U.S. national elec­tion, which also involves the choice of 435 members of the House of Representatives and sufficient senators to determine which party controls the upper house of Congress. The out­come of elections for the House and Senate is critical in deter­mining what a president can and cannot do domestically.

Part four documents the results of elections for the House since 1824 and since the popular election of senators began in 1913. It shows how the increase in split-ticket voting (an individ­ual voting for candidates of different parties for president and for Congress) has led to an era of divided government, with dif­ferent parties in control of the White House and Congress. Di­vided government is sometimes praised because it can require partisan politicians to moderate their views to achieve a cross-party coalition to enact legislation. It can be attacked, however, on the grounds that it blurs accountability for the actions of gov­ernment and makes it more difficult for the president, the only official accountable to the nation as a whole, to carry through a party program.

The Republican Party showed its strength in 2004 by winning control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, a situation that has been normal for many Democratic presidents but not for many successful Republicans. The membership of the House of Representatives is divided relatively evenly with Republicans holding 232 seats and the Democrats 202. Nation­ally, each party's share of the seats was almost exactly in propor­tion to its share of the total vote in congressional elections. GOP candidates won 5o percent of that vote and 53 percent of the seats, while the Democrats won 47 percent of the vote and 47 percent of the seats.

However, at the level of the congressional district, elections to the House of Representatives are today uncompetitive. In 2004 the average representative won by a landslide, and in only a dozen seats was the margin of victory less than 7 percent. In nu­merous seats around the country there was no contest, as an in­cumbent member of Congress did not face an opponent from the other major party. The low number of competitive seats re­flects the readiness of state legislatures to draw boundaries that create safe seats, for example, by giving racial minorities a district in which they are a big majority rather than drawing boundaries that spread the group among several districts, where they might cast the swing vote but nowhere be a majority of electors.

The ability of congressional Democrats as well as Republi­cans to win by a big margin, whoever holds the White House, reflects the advantages of incumbency. Incumbents try to win support by convincing people to think of them as "my" member of Congress, and thus insulate themselves against a national downturn in their party's fortunes. Incumbents can be more visible to their electorate and more easily raise campaign funds. This often scares off challenges in primaries as well as opposi­tion in general elections. Part four examines the extent to which incumbency is successful.

In a federal system, the governors of the 50 states are closer to their voters than is the president. Part five documents the outcome of gubernatorial elections from the beginning of the United States. Altogether, sections three, four, and five make it possible for readers from Alabama to Wyoming to trace how his or her state has voted in presidential, congressional, and guber­natorial elections for as long as it has been part of the Union.

Given the number of offices up for election in a four-year pe­riod and the number of elections since 1789, any reference book on elections must be big. The fifth edition of the Guide to U.S. Elections is comprehensive enough to offer readers a one-stop service, bringing together results that would otherwise be scat­tered across many books and libraries. Most of this information is not available on Web sites, because American elections are 200 years older than the Internet. A thorough index makes it easy to find information quickly; and a format mixing prose, tables, and boxed features invites hours of browsing for insights into American politics past and present.

Guide To Political Campaigns In America by Paul S. Herrnson (CQ Press) is the first complete resource for scholarly and practical insight into every important aspect of political campaigns and campaign activities. Campaigns are a critical part of the political process in the United States, and this unique volume provides students, researchers, scholars, and others interested in campaigns and politics with a broad foundation of knowledge about the history of campaigns and the issues, people, processes, and types and levels of races involved.

Editor in chief Paul S. Herrnson, associate editors Colton Campbell, Marni Ezra, and Stephen K. Medvic, and the chapter authors are recognized specialists in their fields and bring a dynamic combination of high-level scholarship and hands-on experience that set this guide apart from other campaign resources.

• The twenty-seven chapters in the Guide to Political Campaigns in America cover the following themes:

• The evolution of political campaigns

• The political and regulatory environment of campaigning, including suffrage and ballot access

• The importance of the voters and what influences the vote

• The key players in the campaign organization, such as the candidate and consultants, as well as others who interact with the campaign, including the media and political parties

• Key strategies and tactics, such as polling and fund-raising

• Specific types of campaigns, such as those for the presidency, House, Senate, governorship, and key state and local races, as well as campaigns for the judiciary and for initiatives and referenda

• Campaign and election reform

• Tables, figures, case studies, boxed features, photographs, and cartoons enrich the chapters and enliven the topical coverage.

• A comprehensive index and resources for further study of political campaigns round out this authoritative work.

Paul S. Herrnson is director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. He is the author and editor of dozens of works, including Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington, 4th ed. (CQ Press, 2004), and has participated in many aspects of active campaigns for office. He has served as an American Political Science Association congressional fellow and has received several teaching honors, including an Excellence in Teaching Award and a Distinguished Scholar Teacher Award. He has advised the U.S. Congress, the Maryland General Assembly, the Federal Election Commission, and other government agencies and groups on matters pertaining to campaign finance, political parties, and voting systems.

Excerpt: Back in 1816, when John Quincy Adams first used the term campaign to describe one of his political efforts, it was considered unseemly for potential officeholders to solicit votes directly from the people. Although political campaigns, by their simplest definition, remain endeav­ors to collect enough votes to win an election, their shape and conduct have changed significantly over the political life of the nation.

The candidates and others who participate in modern-day campaigning must accomplish a wide variety of tasks to attract voter support. The products of some of these tasks, such as the television ads that saturate the air-waves during presidential elections, are readily visible even to the most apolitical and disinterested individuals, whereas other tasks, including events to raise large fi­nancial contributions, often take place in private and among the few political elites who have the funds to host or attend them. Other activities, such as the design of a particular ballot, may be visible and yet unnoticed by voters—until the ballot ends up scrutinized by election officials, as was the so-called butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election. And still other activities may take place quietly within a campaign organization, such as crafting a theme or conducting opposition research.

Working on this project led me to reflect on the na­ture of political campaigns and on my own fascination and experiences with them. My curiosity about cam­paigns first emerged when I cast my earliest votes—in a mock presidential election held in elementary school and in the 1976 presidential election. The campaigns in the latter contest, featuring incumbent president Gerald R. Ford and his successful challenger, jimmy Carter, were certainly more edifying, but I can still remember the ex­citement with which I cast my "first vote for president" in Mrs. Kelly's kindergarten class at Oaks School #3 in Oceanside, New York. During and after my college years, I was active in campaign politics, helping to con-duct a telephone poll for a House incumbent, going door-to-door to turn out voters for a political party, as­sisting a successful state legislative challenger to devise a strategy and distill a message, performing the same tasks for a not-so-successful congressional challenger, and or­ganizing a Capitol Hill fund-raising event to help a member of Congress who had been defeated in 1994 re-claim his House seat two years later. Today, the role of money in politics, campaign ethics, and the impacts of campaign spending, strategy, and national tides on con­gressional elections are prominent parts of my scholarly research agenda. As director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, I have had opportunities to advise members of Congress, state legislators, and election officials on these topics and on how to improve voting systems and ballots.

Political campaigns have evolved since my elementary school years, since 1976, and even since 1996 to become more complex endeavors. For people like me who were bitten by the politics bug at an early age, studying cam­paigns seems an intrinsically worthy and interesting pursuit. But there are perhaps even more compelling reasons to learn about campaigns. From the perspectives of vot­ers, campaigns give substance and meaning to elections. They provide the information voters can use to choose among different candidates, political parties, and issue platforms. They also can supply citizens who are generally uninterested in politics with the motivation to show up to vote. From the perspectives of candidates, cam­paigns are necessary to unify individual voters into the coalitions of supporters needed to get elected. Cam­paigns also provide elected officials with justifications for their decision making in office—that is, officeholders routinely link their policy initiatives to their political campaigns, pointing to the substance of their campaign promises and the size of their electoral majorities when claiming a mandate to introduce, expand, cut, or elimi­nate specific government programs or regulations. Simi­larly, political parties and interest groups often use their successful campaign efforts to justify pressuring government officials to advance specific policies. On the other side, the candidates, parties, and advocacy groups shut out of power routinely use campaigns to encourage vot­ers to hold those in power accountable for their per­formance in office. Functioning somewhat outside the normal channels of representative government, initia­tives, referenda, and recall campaigns have been used with increasing frequency to challenge the direction of public policy or replace elected officials before their terms in office are completed. And then for the thou-sands who work or volunteer in elections, campaigns can provide a means of earning a livelihood, increasing political influence or contacts, or having fun while work­ing with like-minded people toward a common goal.

Plan of the Book

Whereas most reference works about campaigns cover small slices of the topic, are written by and for political insiders, or focus on election outcomes, the goal in the Guide to Political Campaigns in America is to provide a single source of scholarly and practical insight into a vari­ety of political campaigns and campaign activities. In de­veloping this work, the associate editors, chapter authors, CQ Press, and I aimed to provide a wide audience of stu­dents, researchers, scholars, and those interested in elec­tion campaigns and politics more generally with a broad foundation of information about all aspects of political campaigns. Among the major subjects covered in the Guide are the evolution of campaigns; the strategic con-text, comprising the institutional, legal, and political arrangements in which campaigns take place; and the vot­ers and financial contributors campaigns are designed to influence. The key participants in political campaigns are examined as well. These include the candidates, the cam­paign organizations they assemble, political parties, interest groups, and the mass media. In addition, the Guide in-forms readers about the major tasks associated with waging a political campaign: strategic planning, polling and other research, communications, debates, voter mobi­lization, and fund-raising. Detailed analyses are also un­dertaken of a variety of bids for specific offices, including the presidential nomination and general election cam­paigns and campaigns for Congress, governorships, state legislatures, and local offices. Initiative and referenda campaigns, although not campaigns for an office, are de-scribed as well. The hook concludes with a review of the often hotly debated subject of campaign reform.

Each of the twenty-seven chapters in the Guide in­cludes a discussion of one aspect of the campaign process with relevant facts and figures and historic and contem­porary examples. The authors, all recognized specialists in their field, have drawn from both the classics and the most recent scholarly literature as well as from hands-on experience. Tables, figures, case studies, boxed features, photographs, and cartoons enrich the chapters and enliven the coverage. The result is an authoritative work that presents the major subjects and themes emerging from the rich literature on political campaigns.

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