Chapter 20 — Further Reading

The literature on American elections is enormous and contentious. The list below is curated to give you the most useful starting points for serious post-classroom study. Sources are grouped by approach, with annotations indicating perspective and methodology where relevant. The list intentionally includes voices from across the political spectrum.

Real-time analysis (the daily-feed sources)

  • David Wasserman, Cook Political Report. cookpolitical.com. Wasserman's House Editor reports are the gold standard for House race analysis. The Cook Partisan Voter Index (PVI) is the most-cited measure of district partisan lean. Wasserman writes carefully and is widely respected by analysts of both parties for refusing to lean.
  • Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. centerforpolitics.org. Sabato (University of Virginia) and his team — Kyle Kondik on House and gubernatorial races, J. Miles Coleman on data — produce weekly analysis that pairs current race ratings with longer-term political-science context. Sabato's Crystal Ball books (every two years, post-cycle) are useful retrospectives.
  • Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin. natesilver.net. Silver's Substack (post-FiveThirtyEight) maintains the polling aggregation and election forecasting that defined 2008-2020 forecasting. Silver's perspective is data-first, with a methodologically critical stance on poll quality. The 2024 forecasts were among the most accurate in his record.
  • Inside Elections (Nathan Gonzales). insideelections.com. Gonzales has competed with Sabato and Cook for decades on race ratings; his analysis is more conservative than Cook's in calling races early. His "Vote Above Replacement" analysis is a useful framework for evaluating candidate quality.
  • Split Ticket. split-ticket.org. A newer quantitative-analysis site, run by Lakshya Jain, Harrison Lavelle, and Max McCall. Their swing-vote and demographic-shift analyses use voter-file data accessibly.

Books on the 2020 and 2024 cycles

  • John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck. The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2022. The definitive academic analysis of the 2020 campaign, drawing on the Nationscape survey of 500,000+ Americans and ANES data. Argues that the 2020 election crystallized a "calcified" political environment in which fundamentals dominate over campaign tactics. Essential reading.
  • Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck. The Bitter End (forthcoming 2024 book; published 2025). The expected sequel on the 2024 cycle. Watch for it; the methodology of the 2020 book sets a high bar.
  • Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, et al. NBC News' "Meet the Press" daily summaries. Useful for tracking the daily news cycle of any campaign in retrospect; less useful for analytical depth.

Demographic and coalitional analysis

  • Nate Cohn / The New York Times Upshot. nytimes.com/section/upshot. Cohn's analyses of crosstabs, polling methodology, and demographic shifts have been among the most useful in the post-2016 era. His 2018 work on "the missing white voter" thesis (shown to be incorrect) and his 2024 work on the Hispanic shift are both worth reading.
  • The Pew Research Center "Validated Voters" series. pewresearch.org. Published several months after each election. Considered the gold standard for post-election demographic analysis. The 2024 release (expected mid-2025) will refine the demographic crosstabs from exit polls and VoteCast.
  • Catalist's "What Happened" report. catalist.us. Catalist (a major Democratic voter-file vendor) publishes annual analyses of validated voter data. The "What Happened" reports for 2020 and 2024 are widely cited.
  • TargetSmart and L2. targetsmart.com; l2-data.com. The other major voter-file vendors. Each publishes some public commentary on coalitional shifts.

Conservative perspectives on elections

  • Henry Olsen. The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism. Broadside Books, 2017. Olsen's analysis of the white working-class shift toward Republicans is among the most empirically careful conservative perspectives. He writes for the Washington Post and EPPC.
  • Tara Setmayer. Conservative commentator and former CNN/Lincoln Project contributor; her post-2020 commentary on the Republican Party's coalitional choices and the long-term consequences of 2020-style election denialism is substantial.
  • David French. The New York Times. French is a conservative legal commentator who writes regularly on election law, voting rights, and the post-Trump Republican Party. His perspective is constitutional-conservative; he disagrees with the post-2020 turn of much of the Republican Party.
  • Ross Douthat. The New York Times. Douthat's columns on coalitional shifts (especially among religious and family-formation-stage voters) are useful for understanding right-of-center analytical perspectives.
  • Senator Mitt Romney's papers, McKay Coppins, Romney: A Reckoning. Scribner, 2023. A candid post-Senate look at how Romney processed the post-2020 Republican Party. Insightful for understanding the institutional Republican response to electoral pressure.

Liberal and progressive perspectives on elections

  • Thomas Edsall. The New York Times. Edsall has written about American electoral coalitions for decades. His weekly NYT columns synthesize current academic research on voter behavior and coalitional change. Among the most-cited columnists in political-science classrooms.
  • Ezra Klein. The Ezra Klein Show podcast and NYT columns. Klein covers electoral institutions, polarization, and reform proposals. His 2020 book Why We're Polarized is also relevant.
  • Anat Shenker-Osorio's research at Race-Class Narrative. Liberal-aligned message-testing research; useful for understanding how progressive campaigns think about voter persuasion.
  • The Roosevelt Institute and the Center for American Progress publish electoral-policy analyses regularly. Both are progressive-aligned but produce serious data work.

Electoral College reform

  • George C. Edwards III. Why the Electoral College is Bad for America. Yale University Press (3rd edition 2019). The standard academic argument against the Electoral College. Edwards is a presidential-studies professor at Texas A&M; his case is comprehensive and well-sourced.
  • Tara Ross. Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College. World Ahead Publishing (2nd edition, 2017). The standard academic defense of the Electoral College. Ross is a Texas attorney who specializes in defending the institution; her case engages the strongest critiques carefully.
  • Equal Citizens. equalcitizens.us. Lawrence Lessig's organization, which advocates for various democratic reforms including National Popular Vote. Useful for tracking the active reform movement.
  • NationalPopularVote.com. nationalpopularvote.com. The interest group advocating the NPV Compact. Tracks state-by-state ratification.

Election administration and reform

  • The Brennan Center for Justice. brennancenter.org. The most prominent voting-rights research and advocacy organization. Liberal-leaning but produces empirically rigorous reports on voter ID, mail voting, registration, and election security.
  • The Heritage Foundation Election Integrity Initiative. heritage.org/initiatives/election-integrity. Heritage's election-administration work is conservative-leaning but represents the strongest version of the right's case for stricter election rules.
  • The Election Assistance Commission. eac.gov. The federal agency created by HAVA (2002). Publishes research on election administration practices.
  • The Verified Voting Foundation. verifiedvoting.org. Tracks voting systems and audit laws state by state. Authoritative for technical questions about election infrastructure.
  • Charles Stewart III, MIT Election Data and Science Lab. electionlab.mit.edu. Stewart's MEDSL is the academic home of election administration research. The data resources are extensive and free.

Campaign finance

  • OpenSecrets (Center for Responsive Politics). opensecrets.org. The standard reference for campaign finance data. Tracks spending in federal races, lobbying expenditures, and outside-group spending.
  • The Federal Election Commission. fec.gov. Direct access to candidate filings.
  • The Campaign Finance Institute reports. Now part of the National Institute on Money in Politics (now called Open Secrets). Older but useful trend data.

Battleground state analysis

  • State-specific reporters and political bloggers are often more useful than national outlets for understanding battleground states. For Pennsylvania, John Baer (long-time Inquirer columnist) and Stephanie Chambers (Spotlight PA). For Wisconsin, Craig Gilbert (long-time Milwaukee Journal Sentinel political reporter, now at Marquette Law). For Michigan, Tim Skubick (Gongwer/long-time Lansing political reporter). For Georgia, Greg Bluestein (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). For Arizona, Robert Robb (long-time Arizona Republic). For Nevada, Jon Ralston (Nevada Independent).

Historical context

  • Thomas E. Patterson. Out of Order. Vintage, 1994. Older but seminal: how the modern primary system evolved post-1968 and how media coverage shapes it.
  • Sidney Blumenthal. The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives. Beacon Press, 1980. The book that named the phenomenon.
  • William J. Crotty. American Parties in Decline. Little, Brown, 1984. A classic on how primary reforms weakened parties.
  • Nelson W. Polsby. Consequences of Party Reform. Oxford University Press, 1983. The academic accounting of post-McGovern-Fraser changes.

Where to start

If you have time for one source: read Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck's The Bitter End (2022) for the post-2020 academic consensus.

If you want a daily feed: subscribe to Wasserman/Cook + Sabato's Crystal Ball + Silver Bulletin. Three sources, different perspectives, all rigorous.

If you want the conservative steelman: read Henry Olsen, Ross Douthat, and David French. All write seriously about electoral coalitions from a right-of-center perspective.

If you want to follow the reform debate: read Edwards's Why the Electoral College is Bad for America and Ross's Enlightened Democracy back-to-back. Both are short; both are well-argued; together they map the active disagreement.

The good news is that most of the best electoral analysis is freely available online or in inexpensive books. Bad news: the volume is enormous, and the temptation to read sources that confirm your priors is severe. The discipline of reading across the spectrum is harder than it sounds. Try.