1. Brave New World or Latest Twists on a Familiar Narrative?.- 2. Deep Channels to a Presidency: Occupations and Careers.- 3. Structural Influences, the Democrats: Factions and Constituencies.- 4. Structural Influences, the Republicans: Factions and Constituencies.- 5. The Usual Suspects: Nominating Rules and Nominating Politics.- 6. The Usual Suspects: Candidate Strategies and State Sequences.- 7. Eternal Bandwagon: Nominating Politics and the General Election.

Orthodox reporting and conventional scholarship focuses on the factors that distinguish each presidential contest and then attempts to explain them. This book rather, demonstrates that the politics of presidential nomination has been remarkably stable in the United States since the 1830s and right through to 2020. A common bandwagon dynamic, rolling once through party organizations and now through presidential primaries, permits a simple measure that has predicted nominations well before the decisive threshold was reached, while allowing precise comparisons across the years. So it becomes possible to separate the handful of things that matter for winnowing a large and diverse society into two individual presidential nominees. This funnel of causality moves through the occupational and careers seedbeds of a field of presidential aspirants, squeezing these fields by way of a small set of structural shapers, until party factions and factional struggles—not rules of the game, notcandidate characteristics, not nominating strategies, nor all the other ephemera so beloved of commentators and observers—actually choose a given nominee.
Byron E. Shafer is Hawkins Chair of Political Science Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.
Elizabeth M. Sawyer is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

“Shafer and Sawyer have given us the most comprehensive account of presidential nomination in decades. It is theoretically astute, rich in historical detail, and masterfully synthetic, drawing on almost 200 years of experience with a keen eye for what is particular to a specific era, party, or set of rules and what is, as the authors put it, eternal”.

—Larry M. Bartels, Professor, Vanderbilt University, USA

 

“What sets this study apart from virtually everything else that has recently been written about presidential nominations is the remarkable scope of the inquiry. Where most recent work on this topic has been about one election or one component of the nomination process, Shafer and Sawyer’s book seeks to examine every major component of the process, for the entire period from 1832 to the present, and organizes those components according to the point at which they enter the ‘causal funnel.’ This book raises the bar for all future studies of the presidential nomination process.”

—William G. Mayer, Professor of Political Science, Northeastern University, USA

 

“Many books on the politics of the presidential nomination process focus on the modern era in which candidates vie for the nomination by competing in a series of state-by-state contests. This book offers an important new take by linking the modern era to the past. Through an original analysis of nearly 200 years of nomination contests, Shafer and Sawyer show how a dominant nominating dynamic runs through them all. Most critically, they demonstrate how factional alignments and struggles within the two major parties shape the choice among contenders. The authors argue that it is these deep structural influences—not the candidates themselves, the media who cover them, or the decisions of party leaders—that provide the most insight into the logic of the presidential nomination process.”

—Amber Wichowsky, Associate Professor, Marquette University, USA

Returns constantly to the question of what is genuinely new in presidential selection and what is the modern incarnation of something that should seem familiar Makes the distinction between a fundamentally dynamic process and the adaptations that always come with it Provides coverage of all the main recognized elements of the politics of presidential selection, but in a new and more contemporary way Focuses on the modern period but is solidly rooted in American political history

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