The 2012 Presidential Campaign

Presidential campaigns are our national conversations – the widespread and complex communication of issues, images, social reality, and personas. Political communication specialists break down the 2012 presidential campaign and go beyond the quantitative facts, electoral counts, and poll results of the election, to make sense of the “political bits” of communication that comprise our voting choices. The contributors look at the early campaign period, the nomination process and conventions, the social and political contexts, the debates, the role of candidate spouses, candidate strategies, political strategies, and the use of the Internet and other technologies.

A unique "moneyball" look at the 2012 U.S. presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney "Game changer." We heard it so many times during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. But what actually made a difference in the contest—and what was just hype? In this groundbreaking book, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck tell the dramatic story of the election—with a big difference. Using an unusual "moneyball" approach and drawing on extensive quantitative data, they look beyond the anecdote, folklore, and conventional wisdom that often pass for election analysis to separate what was truly important from what was irrelevant. The Gamble combines this data with the best social science research and colorful on-the-ground reporting, providing the most accurate and precise account of the election yet written—and the only book of its kind. In a new preface, the authors reflect on the place of The Gamble in the tradition of presidential election studies, its reception to date, and possible paths for future social science research.

This diverse and unique collection of essays examines a wide range of communication elements and themes in the context of the 2012 election. Topics include the early campaign and Romney’s nomination battle, candidate image, the rhetoric and campaigning of Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, issues of race, persuasive appeals to voters, the use of music and social media, and Obama’s second inaugural address. Studies of Communication in the 2012 Presidential Campaign aims not only to expand the contributions and understandings of the various roles of communication in the 2012 presidential election, but also to cultivate a more active, democratic citizenry.

In this important and timely volume, Dennis W. Johnson has assembled an outstanding team of political scientists and political professionals to examine one of the fiercest and most closely fought presidential elections of our time. Like its predecessor, Campaigning for President 2008, Campaigning for President 2012: Strategy and Tactics focuses on political management. It is written by both elections/campaign scholars and practitioners, who highlight the role of political consultants and campaigns while also emphasizing the strategy and tactics employed by the candidates, the national political parties, and outside interests. The contributors explore the general mood of the electorate in the 2012 election, the challenges Obama faced after his first term, the primaries, money, communication, the important issues of the election, and finally the election itself.

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.

In his latest laugh-out-loud book of political verse, Calvin Trillin provides a riotous depiction of the 2012 presidential election campaign. Dogfight is a narrative poem interrupted regularly by other poems and occasionally by what the author calls a pause for prose (“Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough”). With the same barbed wit he displayed in the bestsellers Deciding the Next Decider, Obliviously On He Sails, and A Heckuva Job, America’s deadline poet trains his sights on the Tea Party (“These folks were quick to vocally condemn/All handouts but the ones that went to them”) and the slapstick field of contenders for the Republican nomination (“Though first-tier candidates were mostly out,/Republicans were asking, “What about/The second tier or what about the third?/Has nothing from those other tiers been heard?”). There is an ode to Michele Bachmann, sung to the tune of a Beatles classic (“Michele, our belle/Thinks that gays will all be sent to hell”) and passages on the exit of candidates like Herman Cain (“Although his patter in debates could tickle,/Cain’s pool of knowledge seemed less pool than trickle”) and Rick Santorum (“The race will miss the purity/That you alone endow./We’ll never find another man/Who’s holier than thou.”) On its way to the November 6 finale, Trillin’s narrative takes us through such highlights as the January caucuses in frigid Iowa (“To listen to long speeches is your duty,/And getting there could freeze off your patootie”), the Republican convention (“It seemed like Clint, his chair, and their vignette/Had wandered in from some adjoining set”), and Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded “47 percent” speech, which inspired the “I Got the Mitt Thinks I’m a Moocher, a Taker not a Maker, Blues.”

The Inside Story of the 2012 Presidential Campaign The presidential campaign of 2012 was one of the closest and most fierce, expensive, and unpredictable in our history, and Washington Post senior political correspondent Dan Balz chronicled every twist. Obama vs. Romney is a collection of 50 dispatches from the campaign trail, by one the preeminent political journalists of our times. Balz recounts the back-and-forth slugfest of 2012 in a single seamless narrative, including his hundreds of interviews with behind-the-scenes players who crafted both Obama’s scorched-earth re-election game plan and Romney’s audacious strategy for unseating a president. The result is a complete inside story of the campaign from the early days in both parties, through the dramatic ending that wasn’t written until the very last hours of the election.

In this first scholarly reflection on the 2012 elections, a distinguished cast of contributors enlightens students, scholars, and serious political readers about the issues involved in one of the most polarised presidential elections in history. The book includes groundbreaking research on e-politics and online fund-raising, the role of race, class, and gender, and the influence of the Tea Party, Occupy, the economic crisis, and other actors and factors in the election. Characterised by diversity, liveliness, and data-informed analysis, Winning the Presidency 2012 captures the highlights as well as looking ahead.