Palgrave Studies in US Elections – serie

Luke Perry’s inaugural Pivot in the Palgrave Studies in US Elections series examines the impact of Donald Trump on the 2018 midterm campaigns in Central New York, particularly competitive campaigns for NY-19, NY-22, and NY-24. Providing a contextual foundation for these races—considering factors such as incumbency advantage, history of party control of the seat, registered party members, statewide electoral norms, fundraising, and polling—Donald Trump and the 2018 Midterm Battle for Central New York then analyzes the positions and rhetoric of these GOP reelection campaigns, paying particular attention to the continuity and variance in relation to Trump’s personal, populist, and negative campaign style. When examined alongside the results of the midterm election, the outcomes illustrated how the president hurt more than helped House GOP incumbents, revealed the quality of candidates, proved how campaigns and grassroots organizing matter, and demonstrated that moderate Democrats were more successful than progressive ones.

This book examines the highly emotional context of the 2016 US presidential campaign through the scope of political theater and emotional attribution. It takes inventory of the political landscape that defined the campaign and advances the argument that the campaign’s high intensity generated a more interest-attentive citizenry and became an exercise in political theater. A framework operationalizing the components of political spectacle anchors the analysis treating emotions, affect transfer and the rise of negative partisanship. The analytical scope is focused specifically on voters’ emotional responses toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and empirically demonstrates the effects of discrete feelings on five emotional dimensions including pride, hope, fear, anger, and disgust on attitudes about issues ranging from the economy to immigration to the 2016 Supreme Court vacancy. Anchored in the Affective Intelligence Theory and affect transfer, the findings lend support to the principles of negative partisanship that characterized the 2016 presidential contest.

Donald Trump won a significant victory in Iowa in 2016. Although Iowa was carried by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump won the popular vote in 93 of its 99 counties, 32 of which were carried by Obama in 2012. What explains this significant victory, in which a third of Iowa’s counties were flipped? Through a mixed-methods approach, this volume demonstrates that Trump’s electoral victory was shaped by three key factors: firstly, the electorate’s desire for “change” in Washington, D.C.; secondly, Trump’s successful appeals to both the Republican base and white, working-class voters who had previously supported Barack Obama; and thirdly, Iowa’s conservative ideological tendency regarding immigration and race. While contributing to emerging literature on the 2016 presidential elections, this book also serves to aid educators with a published resource on Iowa's electoral politics.

The state of New Hampshire has played a pivotal role in Donald Trump's rise. This volume examines how the Granite State incubated Trump's political ambitions as early as the 1988 campaign cycle, how Trump's return to the state in 2014 presaged his 2016 candidacy, and how the state rescued his ambitions after his defeat in the Iowa caucuses. The book also examines how Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton in the general election, and how the state has in many ways been a microcosm of national politics since Trump's election, as a Republican governor and legislature attempt to pursue their long-deferred agenda in the face of Democratic opposition and as Democrats racked up victories in special and off-year elections. Finally, this book examines what Trump's impact will be on the 2020 presidential primaries.

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.Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via Springerlink.

This book gives a historical and contemporary overview of the redistricting process, using North Carolina for the different political, electoral, and legal issues and debates over the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries. Redistricting has been characterized as “the most political activity in America,” and North Carolina has often been at the heart of recent controversies over this particular activity. In fact, the Tar Heel state was once described as “long notorious for (its) outrageous reapportionment.” Through legislative construction to significant legal challenges, the Tar Heel state has been a noted case study for the past thirty years. From the contentious issues of redistricting principles to the matters of gerrymandering, based on race and politics, North Carolina’s past three decades have seen major U.S. Supreme Court cases deal with redistricting controversies. By exploring this state’s dealings with gerrymandering and redistricting, readers will have a better sense of the dynamics facing the nation as it confronts the 2020 Census and the subsequent redistricting efforts in 2021.

This book gives a historical and contemporary overview of the redistricting process, using North Carolina for the different political, electoral, and legal issues and debates over the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries. Redistricting has been characterized as “the most political activity in America,” and North Carolina has often been at the heart of recent controversies over this particular activity. In fact, the Tar Heel state was once described as “long notorious for (its) outrageous reapportionment.” Through legislative construction to significant legal challenges, the Tar Heel state has been a noted case study for the past thirty years. From the contentious issues of redistricting principles to the matters of gerrymandering, based on race and politics, North Carolina’s past three decades have seen major U.S. Supreme Court cases deal with redistricting controversies. By exploring this state’s dealings with gerrymandering and redistricting, readers will have a better sense of the dynamics facing the nation as it confronts the 2020 Census and the subsequent redistricting efforts in 2021.

This book adopts a regional approach to understanding 2020 presidential election outcomes, taking into account the tribalism that has come to define contemporary US politics and building a path to 270 Electoral College votes. The authors employ qualitative and quantitative methods to examine electoral outcomes in the Midwest, Southwest, Southeast, and Northeast, enriching contextual understandings of the national results and illuminating nuances in public opinion, voter behavior, and party politics. From this foundation, the book offers a comprehensive assessment of prominent issues in the 2020 campaign, which fundamentally shaped and reshaped the nature of the election. Scholars examine seven key issues, including multiple crises that unfolded during the campaign, to understand how these issues affected public opinion and the 2020 campaign.

While significant attention in political science is devoted to national level elections, a comprehensive look at state level political dynamics in the United States is so far sorely missing, and state level electoral developments and shifts are treated as mere reflections of national-level dynamics and patterns. This book argues that this significantly impacts our ability to understand macro-level electoral shifts in the United States in general. The book analyzes gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential election results in the state of Alabama from 1945 through 2020. Comprehensive maps of county-level partisan shifts over time and comparisons between trends for different offices make it possible to isolate pivotal elections and compare state-level and national trends over time. When and where did Alabama’s electorate break with the Democratic Party, and were these breaks uniform across the state? Which counties shifted the most over time, and wasthis shift gradual or characterized by change elections? Comprehensive electoral data, on the county- and precinct-level, make it possible to answer these questions and place state-level electoral behavior in its regional and national context. Detailed county level demographic and economic data is  used to provide local context for electoral patterns, shifts, and continuities.

This book assembles eight chapters by respected and emerging scholars in political science, sociology, and psychology to produce a sustained look at the wide range of identity politics in the 2020 US National Election and the lessons for 2024.  These chapters emerged from papers presented at the American Elections Symposium held at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in March of 2021; six edited volumes have been produced based on research presented at previous conferences. They apply an impressive diversity of theoretical explanations and methodological approaches to explore the factors that shape American elections, and what impact it could have in the future of diversity and democracy.