Battleground

Covering the beginning of the television era to the present, Battleground provides an unprecedented look at the Electoral College strategies used by US presidential campaigns from 1952 to 2020 and what difference they make on election day.

Although US presidential campaigns are among the most closely followed events in the world, academic research tends to conclude that they are much less important for shaping election-day outcomes than broader economic conditions and more gradual socio-political trends. If so, then what campaigners do and say might be entertaining, but should rarely have a decisive influence on who wins the White House. Yet because academic studies typically treat presidential elections as singular events, there is surprisingly little research that considers the strategies that parties pursue in presidential campaigning across multiple election years, how those strategies have evolved over time, or what difference those strategies might make on election day.

Drawing on internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020, Battleground identifies the Electoral College strategies for every major presidential campaign in the modern era, assesses how well they executed their plans, and illuminates what difference their state-by-state allocation of candidate visits and television spending made on election day. From Eisenhower to Trump, Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus, and Costas Panagopoulos show how battleground states have been selected and contested, and why campaign strategies are important for shaping Electoral College outcomes. They find that presidential campaigns in the modern era have been consistently strategic, sophisticated, and effective. As a result, campaign strategies can still be pivotal for shaping Electoral College outcomes, even if their influence looks somewhat different today than in 1952. Battleground provides readers with a sophisticated yet straightforward look at how (and how much) presidential campaigns affect the selection of the most powerful person in the world.