I was kind of surprised that category 14, Book about an election or elections in general got chosen by the group since this kind of focus in politics can become tedious. However, it is an election year, and we're surrounded by election talk. It seems reasonable to read something about an election, including things that could help put current politics in context.
This entry's theme song is Black Sheep's "The Choice is Yours" with the chorus that Billboard tells me sums up every election "you can get with this or you can get with that."
The one that I've chosen to read myself, and which I'm currently about 1/4 of the way through is Edward-Isaac Dovere's book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump. This is the sort of book that probably turns a lot of people off from reading books about elections. It's a very standard political journalist's take, not an academic analysis, and certainly not a book with a point of view from the left. However, if you want to read an account that includes a lot of detailed "political insider" stuff about the internal politics of various campaigns building up to 2020, this isn't a bad read. I don't agree with a lot of Dovere's judgments of particular policies or politicians, but it's useful to know what those judgments are as I believe they are shared by a lot of people with political power. This is very much an example of American political "common sense," which can make it unintentionally infuriating. Other books about the 2020 election that are worth reading include Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague's The Steal which describes Trump's efforts to undo the results. I read this back when it first came out, and it was very similar to what you might have learned if you watched the January 6th hearings. Another choice might be the Congress's January 6th Report - though consider which edition to get. I got the one with Ari Melber's introduction on the recommendation of my local bookseller.
A search for books about the 2016 election led me immediately to the role of Russian propaganda in that election. Probably the most authoritative academic study of that attempt is political scientist, Kathleen Hall-Jamieson's book Cyberwar which came out in the fall of 2018. After finding that, I went searching for books about "election meddling" that would cover the US's interference in other countries' elections, and came across this 2021 study Meddling in the Ballot Box by International Relations professor, Dov Levin, which compares Russian and US electoral interference efforts from 1946 to 2000. Another interesting book that addresses recent elections outside the United States is Leslie C. Gates's Capitalist Outsiders about the influence of oil on the politics of Mexico and Venezuela. Another book that begins with a recent election in Latin America is Sebastian Edwards' The Chile Project which includes substantial discussion of the role of the US in undermining democracy in Chile, but also tells the story of the election of Gabriel Boric in 2021. Rather than being a story of the rise of neoliberalism, it's about neoliberalism's fall. Another book about elections and electoral activity outside the U.S., but involving U.S. influence is Amy Wilentz's The Rainy Season: Haiti Then and Now which updates the author's classic account of the immediate aftermath of the fall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti and goes into the 2000s.
For books about the mixing of elections and criminal conspiracies, why not read about Richard Nixon's rise and fall in the U.S? There are many books to choose from. There's Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in '72 based on his reports for Rolling Stone. I read this book years ago in the summer between my senior year in high school and first year in college, and remember finding it both prescient and hilarious. Or, you could read the classic Joe McGinnis book, The Selling of the President 1968 which features Roger Ailes, who sadly continued to influence American politics for years to come. A relatively recent book on the 1968 election is Aram Goudsouzian's The Men and the Moment, which is also about Nixon's opponents. And of course, you could go for any book on Watergate. There are so many to choose from, starting with the original All the President's Men that made so many people want to be investigative reporters, to the more recent book by Garrett Graff, Watergate: A New History.
While electoral play-by-plays can be interesting, elections can also be sites of analysis to understand broader political context. One example of such a book is political scientist, Joe Lowndes' book From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism which builds from 1948's Dixiecrats to the George Wallace campaigns as a key to understanding the contemporary right. Speaking of 1948, you could pick one of THREE recent books on Henry Wallace and the 1948 US presidential campaign. There's Ben Steil's The World That Wasn't, published this year, John Nichols' Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party and Thomas Devine's Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of American Postwar Liberalism.
If you're more interested in the slightly more recent past, you might want to check out Robert Fleegler's Brutal Campaign about the Bush vs. Dukakis contest in 1988. This was the same period when David Duke ran for the Louisiana state legislature, sparking an early anti-fascist campaign to stop him. Tyler Bridges' book The Rise and Fall of David Duke could be a great choice for this category. Or, if you're interested in a more academic account, you might take a look at the edited collection from U. of Vanderbilt Press, David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South.
If you're interested in going even further back in US electoral history to get at the roots of this situation, a friend and mentor of mine recommends Morgan Kousser's The Shaping of Southern Politics, originally published in 1974 as "the best of the older histories" about the establishment of the Democratic Party's one-party white-supremacist rule of the US South in the late nineteenth century.
If you want to read about elections in Europe, you could go with a real classic, Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which is about a coup, but also includes a lot of discussion of elections that preceded it. This is really an indispensible book for anyone interested in political analysis in my view. Another book that concerns a set of specific elections that ends with the end of elections is Benjamin Carter Hett's book about the immediate rise of Hitler, The Death of Democracy which gets into the details of the German parliament during the Weimar period, and also was written in such a way as to highlight parallels with the Trump era. I am not sure how much this book on Silvio Berlusconi focuses on the ins and outs of specific elections, but it looks like it has at least some discussion of the media and "the democratic process" and might be worth a look. For another account of contemporary far-right authoritarianism, Paul Lendvai's book on Viktor Orban, Orban: Hungary's Strongman includes a significant amount of discussion of his path to electoral victory.
Another book about the election of a major far-right leader outside the US, is the popular book on Modi's election in 2014 by journalist, Rajdeep Sardesai, 2014: The Election that Changed India. I haven't read this book, but the Goodreads reviews from BJP supporters are very negative, which suggests it's a critical analysis of Hindu nationalism.
A friend who's participating in the reading challenge reminded me that there are also novels about elections.
One of those is Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, a classic work about a mayoral race in Boston that was adapted into a movie starring Spencer Tracey. It's now out in a new edition from the University of Chicago Press.
But if a mayoral race is too serious for you, you could try Tom Perotta's popular novel about a high school class-president race, Election, which was also adapted into a (very funny) movie.
Philip Roth's The Plot Against America got a second lease on life because of Trump, and also a TV series adaptation. It's one of his better novels, in my view, though I found the ending a bit strange.
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