Late deciders go for the challenger; turnout helps the Democrats; the gender gap results from a surge in Democratic preference among women--these and many other myths are standard fare among average citizens, political pundits, and even some academics. But are these conventional wisdoms--familiar to anyone who watches Sunday morning talk shows--really valid?
Unconventional Wisdom offers a novel yet highly accessible synthesis of what we know about American voters and elections. It not only provides an integrated overview of the central themes in American politics--parties, polarization, turnout, partisan bias, campaign effects, swing voters, the gender gap, and the youth vote--it upends many of our fundamental preconceptions. Most importantly, it shows that the American electorate is much more stable than we have been led to believe, and that the voting patterns we see today have deep roots in our history. Throughout, the book provides comprehensive information on voting patterns; illuminates (and corrects) popular myths about voters and elections; and details the empirical foundations of conventional wisdoms that many understand poorly or not at all.
Written by three experts on American politics, Unconventional Wisdom serves as both a standard reference and a concise overview of the subject. Both informative and witty, the book is likely to become a standard work in the field, essential reading for anyone interested in American politics.

Late deciders go for the challenger; turnout helps the Democrats; the gender gap results from a surge in Democratic preference among women--these and many other myths are standard fare among average citizens, political pundits, and even some academics. But are these conventional wisdoms--familiar to anyone who watches Sunday morning talk shows--really valid?
Unconventional Wisdom offers a novel yet highly accessible synthesis of what we know about American voters and elections. It not only provides an integrated overview of the central themes in American politics--parties, polarization, turnout, partisan bias, campaign effects, swing voters, the gender gap, and the youth vote--it upends many of our fundamental preconceptions. Most importantly, it shows that the American electorate is much more stable than we have been led to believe, and that the voting patterns we see today have deep roots in our history. Throughout, the book provides comprehensive information on voting patterns; illuminates (and corrects) popular myths about voters and elections; and details the empirical foundations of conventional wisdoms that many understand poorly or not at all.
Written by three experts on American politics, Unconventional Wisdom serves as both a standard reference and a concise overview of the subject. Both informative and witty, the book is likely to become a standard work in the field, essential reading for anyone interested in American politics.

The Electoral College has played an important role in presidential politics since our nation's founding, but surprisingly little information exists about precisely how it affects campaign strategy. Daron R. Shaw, a scholar who also worked as a strategist in both Bush-Cheney campaigns, has written the first book to go inside the past two presidential elections and reveal how the race to 270 was won--and lost.
Shaw's nonpartisan study lays out how both the Democrats and the Republicans developed strategies to win decisive electoral votes by targeting specific states and media markets. Drawing on his own experience with Republican battle plans, candidate schedules, and advertising purchases--plus key contacts in the Gore and Kerry camps--Shaw goes on to show that both sides used information on weekly shifts in candidate support to reallocate media buys and schedule appearances. Most importantly, he uses strikingly original research to prove that these carefully constructed plans significantly affected voters' preferences and opinions--not in huge numbers, but enough to shift critical votes in key battlegrounds.
Bridging the gap between those who study campaigns and those who conduct them, "The Race to 270" will provide political scientists and practitioners alike with fresh insights about the new strategies that stem from one of our oldest institutions.

A critical analysis of the connections that the United States Supreme Court has made between campaign finance regulations and voters' behavior. The sanctity of political speech is a key element of the United States Constitution and a cornerstone of the American republic. When the Supreme Court linked political speech to campaign finance in its landmark Buckley v. Valeo (1976) decision, the modern era of campaign finance regulation was born. The decision stated that in order to pass constitutional muster, any laws limiting money in politics must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling state interest. The lone state interest the Court was willing to entertain was the mitigation of corruption. In order to reach this conclusion, the Court advanced a sophisticated behavioral model that made assumptions about how laws affect voters' opinions and behavior. These assumptions have received surprisingly little attention until now. In The Appearance of Corruption, Daron Shaw, Brian Roberts, and Mijeong Baek analyze the connections that the Court made between campaign finance regulations and voters' behavior. The court argued that an increase in perceived corruption would lower engagement and turnout. Drawing from original survey data and experiments, they confront the question of what happens when the Supreme Court is wrong-and when the foundation of over 40 years of jurisprudence is simply not true. Even with the heightened awareness of campaign finance issues that emerged in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision, there is little empirical support for the Court's reasoning that turnout would decline. A rigorous statistical analysis, this is the first work to simultaneously name and test each and every one of the Court's assumptions in the pre- and post-Citizen's United eras. It will also fundamentally reshape how we think about campaign finance regulation's effects on voter behavior.