2012 Presidential Election

Amnon Cavari is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the IDC Herzliya. Amnon specializes in American politics with specific research interests in the presidency, public opinion and political parties, and the interrelationship between them.He also studies American institutional and public support for Israel. His Ph.D. thesis, “The Party Politics of Presidential Rhetoric,” won the George C. Edwards II Award for the best dissertation on the American presidency in 2011.Richard J. Powell is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine. He is the author of journal articles and book chapters on state politics, presidential-congressional relations, presidential communications, and presidential and congressional elections. He has also published articles on the effects of term limits on the political system and co-authored the books Legislating Without Experience: Case Studies in State Legislative Term Limits and Changing Members: The Maine Legislature in the Era of Term Limits. His current work focuses on White House outreach to Catholics. In 2010 he was a Fulbright Lecturer at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.Kenneth R. Mayer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is the author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2001), which won the Richard M. Neustadt Award for the best book on the presidency published in 2001. His research focuses on presidential unilateral powers, as well as election administration and campaign finance. In 2006 he was the inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Political Science at the Australian National University (Canberra, ACT).

Many stories could be told about the 2012 presidential election. Cavari, Powell, and Mayer have collected several early analyses of that election in this edited volume. The book, the result of an academic conference in early 2013, examines some important facets of the most recent race for the presidency, including the preferences of various ethnic and religious voting groups, voter partisanship and party loyalty, and the consequences of Obama's victory for White House and party politics. . . .[T]he chapters offer valuable insights and analyses. Robert Erickson's chapter, for instance, explains persuasively the election's (highly) predictive outcome and provides a useful primer on the factors that best predict elections. The essay by David Redlawsk, Caroline Tolbert, and Natasha McNeely uses original survey data to demonstrate the degree that 'symbolic racism' influenced voter preferences. In short, The 2012 Presidential Election makes an important contribution to the understanding of Obama's reelection and its aftermath. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.