I was in my senior year of college as the presidential election heated up in the summer and fall of 1988. I watched the primaries, the conventions, and the general election with great interest as I prepared to cast only my second vote in a presidential contest, and I vividly recall how presidential politics, never for the soft-hearted, seemed to be particularly negative. Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, had to fend off the accusations in the Willie Horton ad that he was soft on crime, as well as the unflattering film of him riding a tank against the backdrop that he was soft on defense—at the same time that then-vice president and Republican nominee George H. W. Bush was fighting the image of being a “wimp” and his connection to the Iran-Contra affair late in Reagan’s second term. The 1988 campaign seemed particularly unpleasant—or so we thought. That election seems tame by the standards of today, but it contained glimpses of what was to come, including changes to the electoral map, parties, partisans and even to how campaigns themselves are waged.

John J. Pitney, Jr.’s After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election, is a treat. Part history, part political science, this well-written and engaging survey of the 1988 election highlights what we could not know then: it was the last election in which the Cold War and Soviet threat were pressing issues, the first to have truly negative ads (arguably featuring the most negative political ad since 1964’s “Daisy”), and one of the last in which the internet was a nonfactor. This book reminds us how presidential electoral politics used to be the process of building a political resume that was attractive and strong enough to run at the national level. It also reintroduces us to names that once dominated American politics (Babbitt, Jackson, Clinton, Gore, Hart, Biden, Bentsen, and Gephardt on the Democratic side, and Republicans Baker, Dole, Robertson, Quayle, and, of course, Reagan), as well as political consultants whose names we knew or would come to know in the intervening decades (Atwater, Stone, Manafort, Black). Even Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders appear several times throughout. After Reagan analyzes how politics and parties were fashioned in the last decade of the twentieth century and how partisan identities were shaped across several previous decades. Anyone who reads this book cannot possibly do so without connecting dots from the past to the present: the book shows both how those days differed from and how much they have in common with today.

Pitney begins by painting a political portrait from the 1950s to the late 1980s. The biographies of Bush and Dukakis, though different, reflect the narrative of how presidential candidates were once made. Bush was a son of privilege, though many of his initial moves in political life were made consciously without the help of his connections. From his time as a member of the House of Representatives, to a failed Senate run, to a defeat at the hands of Lloyd Bentsen (who would later be tapped as Dukakis’s running mate), to becoming ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, liaison to China, and director of the CIA, and his experience as a failed presidential candidate in 1980, as well as his vice presidency, George H. W. Bush was one of the most well-prepared presidents in history. Even with these credentials, he stumbled out of the gate in 1988 by losing Iowa. Dukakis, in contrast, had been governor of Massachusetts, lost a bid for reelection, and then came roaring back to regain the Governor’s Mansion. His status as an intellectual (he taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard) helped him win reelection and placed him in good stead for the Democratic nomination in 1988, but his highbrow ways would hurt him in his self-presentation on the campaign trail and in debates.

Pitney provides fair-minded and deeply insightful accounts of each party’s primary. The role of money, endorsements, media, personal backgrounds, and how the nominations were not as front-loaded as today provide us much to think about in relation to current politics. Of particular interest is Pitney’s careful analysis of Super Tuesday, which began as a way for regions (in this case, the South) to amplify their influence. No fewer than 20 states went to the polls on March 8, 1988.

The general election is covered in one chapter and reinforces current scholarship that, although campaigns matter, they matter at the margins, and those margins matter. But the key issues are the fundamentals: presidential approval and especially the economy. Because of the great importance of the state of the economy to the election outcome, some (much?) of the blame leveled at losing candidates is misplaced. In relation to 1988, Dukakis was pilloried because of how he appeared in an ad featuring him in a military tank; his low-key, cerebral reaction to the death penalty question; and the fact that his campaign squandered a 17-point lead after the Democratic convention. Pitney takes all of these factors into account, analyzes their impact on elite and voter perception, and acknowledges that they certainly did not help Dukakis, but argues that the fundamentals were simply too strong in Bush’s favor. In a short concluding chapter, Pitney makes the same argument that the fundamentals largely doomed the Bush reelection bid, in spite of the success of Desert Storm, which translated into record approval ratings. More than anything, a sluggish economy—coupled with the fact that even in the best of circumstances it is difficult to elect the same party’s candidate more than three times—helped put Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992.

There are at least two great analytic strengths of After Reagan. First, as noted, Pitney does not simply claim that fundamentals loomed large in the general election, nor does he claim that they completely swamped the campaigns. Rather, he painstakingly but accessibly traces the two, analyzes their interaction, and persuasively argues how and why these campaigns ended the way they did. His analysis bolsters the argument that all the blame-game, Monday-morning-quarterbacking postmortems that follow elections, which usually place culpability on the candidate and her or his campaign, are often misplaced.

This leads to the second great strength, which is the through line from the late 1980s to present-day politics and the careful analysis of the primaries, underscoring the seeds in each party that would blossom in 1988 itself or take hold and flourish in the present day. For example, Pitney traces how California and Texas, both of which went for Bush, were about to become reliably Democratic (California) and Republican (Texas); how the Hispanic vote, which was not a high-turnout demographic, has become key for Democrats since Hispanic turnout has increased dramatically; and the cementing of the influence of the Evangelical wing of the Republican Party. All of these trends were present in 1988 but were poised to take off in the intervening years. Pitney also considers the roots of cable television and right-wing talk radio, dramatic differences in messaging and fundraising that were not as prevalent in 1988 as in the internet age, and how 1988 was among the last campaigns to distinguish between campaigning and governing.

In sum, After Reagan is highly recommended. A few typos aside, it is highly readable, engaging, and extremely interesting. It would fit well in whole or in part in undergraduate or graduate classes on campaigns and elections, or the presidency itself. Though it is about the 1988 election, the book succeeds in illuminating almost as much about our current politics.