Part political memoir, part political science, this is a valuable book on presidential elections that should be read by consultants and academics alike. Drawing on his experience as a Bush strategist and a political science professor at the University of Texas, Daron Shaw argues that these two audiences could learn a great deal about what interests them by paying more careful attention to each other. This theme is woven throughout Shaw's consideration of Electoral College strategies, execution of those strategies, and their effect on American electorates. Though he has clear political predilections that may make Democratic readers occasionally bristle, his rigorous examination of the best data on presidential campaigns available to date keeps him squarely in the realm of political science. The end result is a book that provides irreplaceable insight on how campaigns might better function, on the subjects that political scientists could do a better job of exploring, and on the potential future of elections research.
The Race to 270 is organized into six chapters. In the first, Shaw outlines the principal arguments of the book: 1) that presidential campaign strategy must be viewed through the dual lens of the Electoral College and campaign efficiency; 2) that media markets are an overlooked, but essential, level of analysis; 3) that campaign effects must be understood in dynamic terms; and 4) that campaigns aim to shape voters' perceptions of the candidate before they try to win their vote. Although many of these themes are familiar from Shaw's work, his intent on reshaping the way we think about studying presidential campaigns has the effect of putting them in a new light. As such, this chapter is best viewed as a call for political scientists to work differently rather than as a set of new theoretical propositions about campaigns.
After a relatively straightforward review of previous research in Chapter 2, Shaw provides three strong empirical chapters that should set the agenda for presidential campaign research in years to come. In the first, he uses his firsthand knowledge of the Bush campaign to inform our understanding of how Electoral College strategies are formed. More descriptive than explanatory in nature, Shaw builds on his previous work to explain how states—and media markets—obtain the attention of a campaign's decision makers. The gist of this discussion is that campaigns use a state's previous electoral history, Electoral College value, and current polling data to prioritize them for campaign outreach. Importantly, he points out that these strategies are constantly in flux, responding to a variety of short-run organizational and political pressures. Though this is supplemented with a “best guess” as to how his opponents developed their strategy, one is left wondering how much of what we learn here is a product of Shaw's input rather than a description of more generic processes that stretch across elections. I was also somewhat surprised that Shaw does not take up the issue of constructing messages—probably the key to understanding campaign effects from the perspective of both political scientists and consultants—even though he was in a firsthand position to shed light on how this affects decisions on both where to send resources and how to spend them. As a consequence, I suspect that most readers will find this particular chapter an interesting read, even if it is not quite the theory of campaign strategy that some might expect to see.
The next two chapters are more analytic in nature and therefore more likely to garner a response from the scholarly community. In Chapter 4, he examines the extent to which the campaigns followed their plans using a spatial and geographic examination of resource allocation. Not surprisingly, he finds that the strategic plans are followed to a significant degree, with some states and media markets receiving tremendous attention and others being ignored almost to the point of irrelevancy. Of particular interest was the handful of market-by-market temporal examinations Shaw conducted that provide a valuable tool for studying both how campaigns deviate from their plans and shed light on the extent to which this is linked to the less systematic aspects of strategizing. For example, Democrats seemed more willing to ride the wave of free media provided by presidential debates than Republicans were.
Although this chapter illustrates the tension between academic concerns with a central tendency and a consultant's obsession with deviations from the norm, it successfully accomplishes its goal of raising new issues for both groups to consider. Shaw accomplishes this by illustrating the value of media markets and time-based data for evaluating the conventional wisdoms that emanate from campaigns. Most compelling on this score is Shaw's analysis of Tennessee in 2000—he shows that the Bush campaign did make the first move in appealing to this supposedly Gore stronghold, but he also demonstrates that the Democrats did not ignore it as the mass media implied. Indeed, Shaw goes one step further to suggest that it was West Virginia that better fits this storyline. This insight notwithstanding, I found myself wishing that Shaw had done more to more systematically theorize about and then test for the factors that explain variation in these data.
The final empirical chapter addresses what might be the most frustrating question in American electoral behavior: What effect does all of this campaign activity have on election outcomes? As much as Shaw dismisses the validity of the campaign effects debate earlier in the book, he remains concerned with the fundamental question of how effectual campaigns are for understanding votes. The primary stimulus for this is his belief that disaggregating data by media markets, weeks, and candidate impressions will likely shed additional light on this subject. On this score, Shaw is right. Drawing on a “smorgasbord of data,” including internal polls from the Bush campaign, Shaw shows that campaigns have generally impressive effects that act in the expected direction (i.e., candidates benefit from more advertising and appearances), even if they frequently do not measure up to standard levels of statistical significance.
Even though Shaw does an outstanding job in both analyzing the data and drawing appropriate conclusions, this chapter is likely to garner the strongest reaction from other scholars. Two questions stand out in my mind. First, I think we must think more clearly about possible endogeneity in estimating the impact of presidential resource allocations on the electorate's opinions of the candidates. Shaw makes a compelling argument that his specific data and model accounts for such problems, though I am not yet convinced that the subject is entirely closed. In particular, a better understanding of how campaigns react to information over time in adjusting their strategic plans (noted above) would potentially yield better insight as to whether campaigns are effective. Second, Shaw's analysis discounts the value of nonbattlegrounds for understanding campaign effects. On the one hand, I am sympathetic to his argument that you can only understand campaign effects by examining the places the campaign occurs. On the other hand, the nonbattlegrounds provide a useful baseline against which we can judge the battleground dynamics and evaluate the mechanisms by which campaign effects occur.
The closing chapter ends by using the tools developed in previous chapters to evaluate the purported “mistakes” attributed to Democrats and Republicans in 2000 and 2004. It then discusses the potential insights that Shaw's two audiences hold for each other, most notably arguing that political scientists should consider expanding their repertoire of tools to include techniques favored by consultants (e.g., dial groups). The final section evaluates potential trends in the future of presidential elections, including a potential movement away from over-the-top television advertisements and an increased emphasis on personal contact. Though this chapter holds many useful lessons, I found it most interesting for its well-defined agenda for future research on presidential elections.
Presidential campaigns have been the subject of intense interest for many years, usually because the evidence of their influence is milder than what common sense suggests it should be. This book is an outstanding resource for how we can move past that agenda with new data, techniques, and questions in an effort to better understand the American electoral process. It is well-written, well-conceived, and well-done. It is appropriate for undergraduates and graduates alike, but it is most notable for its undeniable contribution to the scholarly and practical debates on the operation and impact of campaigns.
