In Pursuit of the White House 2000: How We Choose Our Presidential Nominees - Book Reviews - Review

In Pursuit of the White House 2000: How We Choose Our Presidential Nominees. Edited by William G. Mayer. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000, 389 pages, $24.95 paper.

In Pursuit of the White House 2000 is the second volume on the presidential nomination process edited by William G. Mayer. It is a book best described by the subtitle, How We Choose Our Presidential Nominees. This collection of nine essays is an intriguing analysis of the modem process of presidential nomination organized around the "unanticipated consequences" of the McGovern-Fraser reforms.

In the introductory chapter, Michael Hagen and William Mayer argue that the 1968 proposals enacted under the McGovern-Fraser Commission "set in motion a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing national conventions and presidential nominations." The essay sets the tone for the book with the statement "changing the rules really did change the game." The authors provide evidence of change with extensive statistical measures from 1952-1996, including the increase in primaries, the lengthening of presidential candidacy announcements, the convention vote, and trends in front-loading and winnowing. Hagen and Mayer reflect the solid quantitative orientation throughout the book.

Andrew Busch investigates how the McGovern-Fraser reforms contributed to front-loading and the increasing strategic importance of momentum for candidates in the early primaries and caucuses. He shows how the bonus delegate incentive offered in the 1996 Republican reforms did little to offset the political incentives of the early primary. The essay suggests why primary compression will continue as long as it benefits well-funded frontrunners, as it did for Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000.

Emmett Buell demonstrates how post-1968 reforms made New Hampshire a critical factor in momentum and the nomination. His content analysis of media coverage indicates that New Hampshire figured in nearly one-fourth of all primary coverage on nightly television newscasts in 1984 and no other state except Iowa in 1996 received comparable exposure. Still, he finds that more personalized campaigning, or retail politics, is important to New Hampshire voters reporting to exit pollsters.

Jonathan Bernstein argues that the accelerated presidential nomination process has made candidate campaign organizations the source of "The New New Presidential Elite." This is an interesting update of Jeanne Kirkpatrick's earlier study of The New Presidential Elite (1976). Bernstein reconstructs the career paths of Campaigns and Elections magazine's "Rising Stars" from 1988 through public records such as the Congressional and Federal Staff Directory. He concludes that long-term candidate loyalty is rare for this new presidential elite, yet his findings are admittedly hindered by a narrow focus on younger party elites (e.g., James Carville and Scott Reed) in the period under investigation.

Jody McMullen and Barbara Norrander address the sorely needed topic of gender differences among convention delegates and primary voters. Although the McGovern-Fraser reforms were a critical step toward greater participation by female convention delegates, most examination of the gender gap has focused on the presidential election. Past studies, including Kirkpatrick's, found that women delegates mirrored male delegates, even on women's s issues.

McMullen and Norrander's examination of 1992 and 1996 delegate and exit polls demonstrates that gender differences among primary voters and convention delegates are similar to the general election. Women are more concerned with social welfare issues and men are more focused on economic issues when deciding which party candidate to support.

New Hampshire, in particular, provides a unique environment to investigate the process of political learning because of the substantial media and candidate attention to the small state in a front-loaded primary process. Tami Buhr uses content analysis and poll data collected during the 1996 New Hampshire primary to examine the quantity and quality of information to make an informed choice. She determines that New Hampshire residents are more knowledgeable about politics than the national population despite the poor quality of media campaign coverage, since respondents learn more from retail communications (meeting, mail, phone calls) than from wholesale communications (newspaper, network and local TV). Buhr cautions that the movement to more regional primaries and greater reliance on wholesale campaigning will negatively impact political learning. However, a more extensive study outside of the New Hampshire primary is necessary to support wide-scale effects.

Samuel Best and Clark Hubbard pay important attention to "The Role of Televised Debates in the Presidential Nomination Process," an area too often neglected for research directed at televised debates during the general election. The authors find considerable evidence in pre- and post-tests that "watching the candidate's debate can have a profound influence on viewer's evaluation of the participants." Voters' attitudes on the importance of various policy issues and attitudes toward candidates may be more malleable at this earlier stage of the campaign than during the general election. We are reminded of "defining moments" in televised primary debates, including Walter Mondale's oft-quoted line of "Where's the Beef?" regarding the proposals of 1984 challenger, Gary Hart.

There is considerably more inter-party divisiveness in the selection of the presidential nominee, as the rules have changed the nature of the game. Lonna Atkeson's essay considers the effects of a divisive contest on a nominee's success in the general election, challenging the divisive primary hypothesis. Her data shows that "intense inter-party battle may instead bring winners and losers closer together in their evaluation of their party's nominee." Relying upon ANES data from 1952-1996, she argues that candidate quality, such as the evaluation of an incumbent president, "is a much stronger predictor in explaining general election outcomes than is the divisiveness of a presidential nomination contest." Her findings raise interesting potential questions about the narrow general election between Al Gore and George W. Bush after bitter campaigns against primary challengers, Bill Bradley and John McCain.

Mayer's concluding chapter provides a brief historical overview of the increasing importance of the politics of vice presidential selection. He argues that another "unanticipated consequence" of nomination reform through front-loading was that the president had more time to consider vice presidential candidates. Thus, the selection of the vice president has become a critical component in the presidential selection process, in which the vice presidential selection is often the frontrunner for the future party nomination. Mayer's historical discussion is informative but curiously distinct from the preceding chapters devoted to quantitative analysis of the presidential nomination process.

Overall, these are nine well-written pieces in need of an introductory and conclusive chapter integrating the relevance of the diverse research to the 2000 presidential nomination. The authors provide substantial evidence of change in the presidential nomination environment, demonstrating how post-1968 reforms have affected the electoral process, electorate, convention delegates, and political elite. The authors raise important concerns about the "unanticipated consequences" of the McGovern-Fraser reforms, agreeing that recent reform attempts have done little to slow the compressed primary schedule.

The essays provide a solid foundation for understanding how Gore and Bush became the 2000 Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. The book itself makes almost no reference to the actual 2000 presidential nomination, clearly hindered by the time frame for publication. Hagen and Mayer note in the introductory chapter how campaign finance regulations in the early 1970s had a significant impact on the presidential nominating process, but there is scant attention to campaign spending in the book. This is a particularly noticeable omission since campaign finance reform was an important issue in the 2000 presidential primaries. A focus on the New Hampshire primary is of understandable research interest but difficult to generalize to other state populations. The book could also benefit from a broader investigation of additional primary states considering the movement toward more regional primaries and the increasing significance of open primaries in 2000.

For a more comprehensive discussion of the 2000 presidential nomination and selection process, I would recommend books such as Stephen Wayne's The Road to the White House 2000 or Michael Goldstein's Guide to the 2000 Presidential Election. In Pursuit of the White House 2000 is a unique collection of essays investigating how we choose our presidential nominees and the continuing impact of the McGovern-Fraser reforms. It is a particularly valuable resource for quantitatively-oriented researchers interested in survey and content analysis. The appendices are often as informative as the text, with a wealth of information on the data, measurement, indicators, and sources. Mayer's book contains critical findings certain to stimulate new areas of inquiry.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
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