American Elections

Rosenthal suggests that right-wing populism is a protean force whose prime mover is the resentment felt toward perceived elites, and whose abiding feature is its ideological flexibility, which now takes the form of xenophobic nationalism. In 2016, American right-wing populists migrated from the free marketeering Tea Party to Donald Trump's "hard hat," anti-immigrant, America-First nationalism. This was the most important single factor in Trump's electoral victory.

With 2016 promising to be an interesting and hotly contested election year, Votes of Confidence offers young listeners an essential guide to the past, present, and future of American elections.

In the last two years, the United States - its history, assumptions, prejudices, and vocabulary - have all cracked open. A woman won a state presidential primary contest (quite a few of them, actually) for the first time in this country's history. Less than a year later, a vice-presidential candidate concluded her appearance in a national debate and immediately reached for her newborn baby. A few months after that, an African American woman moved into the White House - not as an employee but as the First Lady.

The Baby Boomers are the largest and most powerful generation in American history—and they aren't going away any time soon. They dominate cultural and political institutions and make up the largest slice of the electorate. Generational conflict, with Millennials and Generation Z pitted against the aging Boomer cohort, has become a media staple. The generation gap is widening into a political fault line.

In Why Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigen explains the tendency of parties to elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office. He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more former generals running and why the number of veterans in election cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in US electoral history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office.

In this sometimes shocking and always riveting book, Robert G. Kaiser who has covered Congress, the White House and national politics for The Washington Post since 1963, explains how and why over the last four decades, Washington became a dysfunctional capital.

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization - a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.

New York Times best-selling author David Talbot and New Yorker journalist Margaret Talbot illuminate “America’s second revolutionary generation” in this gripping history of one of the most dynamic eras of the 20th century - brought to life through seven defining radical moments that offer vibrant parallels and lessons for today.

From the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at how the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism. Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change - or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims....

From Chris Matthews, best selling author of Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, comes this celebration of the American spirit. Matthews presents a portrait of a country that enters the world arena armed with an extremely potent weapon: the collective notions we carry of America at its best. It's a picture of more than just a nation challenged but a people ready and eager to prevail.

Increasingly, political parties have adopted not only different policies, but different sets of facts. As E. J. Fagan argues, partisan think tanks have helped create these alternate realities in their capacity as de facto formal party organizations. Through the analyses generated by aligned think tanks, political elites on both the left and right frequently offer radically different assessments of a policy's consequences.

In their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.

Award-winning authors Julian E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg bring together the nation's top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to examine how the lack of stability and integrity of the electoral process has become a threat to national security. Contributors outline how these problems have emerged and propose concrete solutions to move us into a period of greater stability. At once urgent and comprehensive, Our Nation at Risk is the preeminent book on election security and a must listen for anyone invested in the fight for democracy.

In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Josh Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown and some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have changed our elections, and therefore the nation, irrevocably. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in shaping not only our elections but the very essence of the right to vote.

In Last Chance to Save American Democracy, political strategist Haven Scott McVarish takes us through the intentional dismantling of democracy begun by Republican party funders after Obama's landslide in 2008. These funders and their willing Republican servants weaponized unlimited dark money, extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and diversionary propaganda to make it impossible for Democrats to effectively govern or win a majority. Only Trump’s massive unpopularity allowed Democrats to barely win the trifecta in the 2020 elections.

American Identity in Crisis weaves together three remarkable stories: the making of an activist in the wake of the 2016 presidential election; the fight against the onerous rules that are being used to keep vulnerable and targeted populations from participating in all facets of American life -from obtaining jobs and housing to going to the polls—and how we can solve a problem that impacts millions of American adults. Kat Calvin ties all of these threads together in profound ways.

Casey Dominguez's Commander in Chief systematically analyzes the authority that members of Congress ascribe to the president as commander in chief and the boundaries they put around that authority.

The saga of the Freedom Riders is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, 450 Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account.

In American Patriots, historian Ralph Young chronicles the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. Some of these protesters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people, frequently overlooked, whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. Yet not all dissent is equal. In 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol, and Americans on both sides of the aisle watched the destruction with horror. American Patriots contrasts this attack with the history of American protest.

From the author of The New York Times best sellers Treason and Slander comes an updated Ann Coulter compendium, complete with reader responses and television and talk radio transcripts (Couric, Donahue, Franken). With titles like "Would Mohamed Atta Object to Armed Pilots?", "9 out of 10 Caribou Support Drilling", and "Liberal Pimps for Clintonism", How to Talk to a Liberal covers Coulter's waterfront on her favorite issues and targets, from national security to Hollywood.