All Alabama elections are colorful, but the 1986 gubernatorial contest may trump them all for its sheer strangenessWith the retirement of an aging and ill George Wallace, both the issues and candidates contending for the office were able to set the course of Alabama politics for generations to follow. Whereas the Wallace regimes were particular to Alabama, and the gubernatorial campaign was conducted in a partial vacuum with his absence, Alabama also exper...

Ever since Donald Trump entered the presidential race—in a press conference attended by paid actors, in which he slandered Mexican immigrants—he has dominated headlines, becoming the unrestrained id at the center of one of the most bizarre and alarming elections in American history.It was not always so. In 1996, longtime New Yorker writer Mark Singer was conscripted by his editor to profile Donald Trump. At that time Trump was a mere Manhattan-centric megalomaniac, a faili...

It Still Takes A Candidate serves as the only systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study, a national survey conducted of almost 3,800 'potential candidates' in 2001 and a second survey of more than 2,000 of these same individuals in 2008, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less ...

America Afire is the powerful story of the election of 1800, arguably the most important election in America's history and certainly one of the most hotly disputed. Former allies Adams and Jefferson, president versus vice president, Federalist versus Republican, squared off in a vicious contest that resulted in broken friendships, scandals, riots, slander, and jailings in the fourth presidential election under the Constitution.

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman explains in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. Drawing on science, politics, and history, Shenkman explores the hidden forces behind our often illogical choices.Political Animals challenges us to go beyond the headlines, which often focus on what politic...

In the annals of presidential elections, the hotly contested 1876 race between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden was in many ways as remarkable in its time as Bush versus Gore was in ours. Chief Justice William Rehnquist offers readers a colorful and peerlessly researched chronicle of the post—Civil War years, when the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by misjudgment and scandal, and Hayes, Republican governor of Ohio, vied with Tilden, a wealthy Democratic lawyer and succes...

Contemporary observers of politics in America often reduce democracy to demography. Whatever portion of the vote not explained by the class, gender, race, and religious differences of voters is attributed to the candidates' positions on the issues of the day. But are these the only--or even the main--factors that determine the vote? The Performance of Politics develops a new way of looking at democratic struggles for power, explaining what happened, and why, during the 2008 presidential ca...

The first comprehensive account that proves that James Comey threw the 2016 election to Donald Trump. “Compelling criticism…lapsed Trump supporters might well open their minds to this attorney’s scholarly, entirely convincing proof of the damage done” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).During the week of October 24, 2016, Hillary Clinton was decisively ahead of Donald Trump in most polls. Then FBI Director James Comey sent his infamous letter to Congress on ...

Embattled Nation explores Canada’s tumultuous wartime election of 1917 and the people and issues that made it a pivotal moment in Canadian history.Embattled Nation explores the drama of Canada’s tumultuous election of 1917. In the context of the bloody battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and of the Halifax explosion, Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative government introduced conscription and called for a wartime election. Most Liberals, led...

Welcome to EPISODE ONE of “Ask Me Why The Thought of a Donald Trump Presidency Scares the Shit Out of Me.” I started this ebook series not to convince anyone to change their damn vote or to get you to commiserate with me over the shit-show that primary season has been so far. Nope. I’m writing this to document the madness for myself and to help deal with the stress of it all. And to share some thoughts…

Presidential candidates are a breed apart, often propelled by traits that have shaped their careers and have deep roots in personal histories.Often their greatest strength can turn at supernova speed into their greatest weakness. The exact qualities that set them apart from the field trip them up eventually over the long haul of a presidential campaign.It was as a lifelong broadcaster that Mike Huckabee, the onetime "pastor on TV," perfected the conservative amiability that h...

A political satire that reimagines George Wallace's last run for governor of AlabamaIt's the summer of George Wallace's last run for governor of Alabama in 1982, and the state is at a crossroads. In Katherine Clark's All the Governor's Men, a political comedy of manners that reimagines Wallace's last campaign, voters face a clear choice between the infamous segregationist, now a crippled old man in a wheelchair, and his primary opponent, Aaron Osgood, a progressive...