The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics

Extract

The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics. By Richard Johnston, Michael G. Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $55.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States provides Richard Johnston, Michael Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson with a “natural experiment” to investigate the dynamics of support for George W. Bush and for Al Gore over the course of the campaign. As we all know, the 2000 election gave somewhat contradictory results: a popular majority for one candidate and an Electoral College majority for the other. Further, the campaign had two distinct elements that these researchers capitalize on for their work—the nationwide news coverage provided by the mass media and the campaign ads running on television chiefly, if not exclusively, in the battleground states. Given the difference between the forecasts provided by previously reliable models of presidential campaigns and the actual outcome of the 2000 contest, Johnston et al. ask whether campaign dynamics may account for the disparity.