CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new book co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political scientist explores the road to the White House through three distinct eras of presidential campaigning.
The book, “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era,” draws on seven decades of data from public and private sources to explore the Electoral College strategies of every major presidential campaign from 1952-2020, said Scott Althaus, the Merriam Professor of Political Science at Illinois and co-author of the book.
“The premise of the book is simple: How do presidential campaigns get to the tipping point of 270 Electoral College votes? Successful campaigns don’t need to win every voter in every district in every state, nor do they try to,” Althaus said. “What successful presidential campaigns do is ruthlessly target the states and districts most critical to building a winning formula that gets them to 270 and then allocate their resources accordingly. It sounds simple, but in reality it’s complicated by limited information, finite resources and uncertainty over which way the political winds are blowing in the months and weeks leading up to Election Day.”
Althaus’ co-authors are Costas Panagopoulos of Northeastern University and Daron R. Shaw of the University of Texas at Austin.
According to Althaus, what distinguishes “Battleground” from other books about presidential campaigning is its wealth of once-secret data and its long time span for analyzing the evolution of presidential campaign strategies and their effects. The researchers travelled around the country for years to find insider campaign memos and ad buy records from private archives and presidential libraries. This allowed them to be the first to completely reconstruct the advertising allocations and daily public appearances of all major party campaigns spanning 18 presidential contests.
The resulting book, which was more than two decades in the making, will “let readers see how presidential campaigns are strategized and executed, as well as their impact on statewide outcomes, electoral vote totals and representative democracy itself,” said Althaus, who also is the director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and a professor of communication at Illinois.
“It also shows how those different ways of moving towards 270 electoral votes have evolved while in some respects they have stayed basically the same,” he said.
According to the book, three distinct eras of presidential campaigns emerged during the period studied: wholesale campaigning (1952-1972), zero-sum campaigning (1976-2000) and microtargeted campaigning (2004-2020).
Although there have been some significant changes to electoral strategy since the Truman era, the most notable one has been the increasing polarization of the American electorate.
“Today’s campaign strategists have unparalleled tools for finely slicing and dicing voter data, but their ability to actually sway voter sentiment and deliver meaningful results may be more constrained than ever before,” Althaus said.
“The problem today is that the voters these strategists are trying to persuade tend already to be more committed to particular candidates and political parties than they were in the past. It’s more than a little counterintuitive, but our book shows that the mounds of data campaigners now have at their fingertips don’t allow them to move public opinion much better than did campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Even though these Election Day campaign effects haven’t changed much over time in terms of their size or magnitude, “they’re still decisive effects,” Althaus said.
“Some political scientists might dismiss the likely impact of campaign ads or candidate appearances as small potatoes,” he said. “We show that those smallish effects are often larger than the narrow margins that battleground states are being won by. So they definitely have potential to determine Election Day outcomes.”
Ultimately, the book concludes that winning campaigns prevail in part because they develop effective strategies with multiple paths to victory and then put their ads and candidate time into a smaller number of swing states that provide flexible options in the quest for 270 Electoral College votes.
“Getting to 270 is the whole ballgame with the Electoral College,” Althaus said. “The electoral maps that successful campaigns take to get to 270 have, to be sure, evolved considerably in the modern era. For instance, we show that there are fewer battleground states being targeted by campaigns today than used to be the case. But the basic ability of presidential campaigns to execute these Electoral College strategies in ways that actually move Election Day votes doesn’t seem to be all that much different today than it was in the 1950s.
“Those smallish effects are really interesting when we think about all the outreach technology and the microtargeting of voters that campaigns have developed since the early days of television. But it’s still the case that small numbers of voters changing their minds in just the right states can shift historic outcomes pretty dramatically. We saw that potential most recently in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, 2012, 2016 and 2020.”
As for the 2024 election … ?
“Although the change from President Biden to Vice President Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket has few precedents in the modern era — the closest analogue is President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrawing in March 1968 — one of the things our book helps to explain is how to assess these kinds of game-changing moments going forward,” Althaus said. “From a race-to-270 strategy standpoint, it’s certainly clear that there are now multiple pathways to victory available for a Harris-Walz ticket that were not available for a Biden-Harris ticket, and that’s where presidential campaigns want to be.”
The book was published by Oxford University Press.