Introduction

Skip to the Reading List

Ultimately, voters, not candidates, rule the day in any election and millions of dollars are currently being spent to identify who these voters are and what matters most to them. Campaigns need to know how to reach the electorate and how to tailor candidates’ messages to garner the most votes. While polling gives snapshot views of voter response to issues, what’s missing is the long-term assessment of voting patterns and populations. Fortunately, Princeton University Press has numerous books that blend data and the big picture.

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is a landmark book from statistician Andrew Gelman that presents data on the influence of party affiliation, location, and religious beliefs on voting patterns.

Politicians talk about whether we are in a post-racial period following President Obama’s election in 2008, yet books like Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America by Desmond S. King & Rogers M. Smith provide an authoritative account of exactly how race still matters.

Campaigners describe how they are going to reach Hispanic or religious voters, but without books like New Faces, New Voices: The Hispanic Electorate in America by Marisa Abrajano and Michael Alvarez or Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church by Timothy Matovina that describe shifts in populations and politics, how can they know what really matters to these voters?

And when we try to assess the issues that matter the most to voters, it is important to have the input of writers like Bryan Caplan (The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies) or Sunshine Hillygus and Todd Shields (The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns).

–Chuck Myers, group publisher in social sciences and editor in political science

Exclusive Excerpt

Click here to download an article on Interest Groups

Excerpted from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History.

Featured Book

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
Why Americans Vote the Way They Do
Andrew Gelman

Skip to the complete
reading list