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1
The making of the President, 1960 (1960)
Published
Kennedy against Nixon, 1960
The starting point for everything else here. White followed the race from first primary to election night and wrote it up as one long story with characters, turning points and a cast of advisers, rather than a pile of dispatches. It won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, stayed on the bestseller list for more than 40 weeks and set off the whole tradition of campaign books.
Its reverence for the presidency and for the people chasing it now reads as of its time, and later writers in this list were partly reacting against it. White covered 1964, 1968 and 1972 the same way, but this first volume is the one to start with.
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Before the storm (2001)
9.3/10on Open Library
Published
Goldwater's defeat, 1964
The one book here written decades after the fact, and it earns its place because it takes the losing side seriously. Perlstein follows the conservative activists who won the Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater, then the landslide defeat, and argues that 1964 was a turning point whose aftershocks American politics still feels.
It is history rather than reporting, drawn from archives and interviews rather than a seat on the plane, so it trades immediacy for hindsight and runs to more than 600 pages. It won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was Perlstein's first book; his later volumes, starting with Nixonland, carry the story forward.
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Selling of the President, 1968 (1969)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Nixon's television campaign, 1968
Where White watched the candidates, McGinniss sat with the admen. He got inside the team building Richard Nixon's television appearances and recorded, with their own words left in, how a candidate who had lost in 1960 was repackaged for the screen.
It is short and sharp, and its cynicism about political marketing has become the common sense of every campaign book since. It spent 31 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and McGinniss was 26 when it did. Pair it with the other 1968 books here, which watch the same year from the street and the convention floor.
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An American Melodrama (1969)
Published
The whole of 1968, from Johnson's exit to Nixon
Three British journalists who covered the campaign for a London paper produced the most complete single account of the year that broke American politics: Johnson stepping aside, the primaries, the murder of Robert Kennedy, the chaos in Chicago and, more briefly, Richard Nixon's narrow win at the end, all in one narrative.
Being outsiders helps. They explain the machinery of primaries and conventions that American writers took for granted, which makes this the best place to understand how a nomination was won before the modern primary system. It is long and dense, and older copies are the usual way to find it.
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Miami and the siege of Chicago (1968)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
The 1968 conventions
Mailer went to both party conventions on assignment from Harper's: the Republicans in Miami, where Nixon was nominated, and the Democrats in Chicago, where the anti-war protests outside became the story. The result is the most vivid writing in this list and the least objective, with Mailer as a character in his own reporting.
Read it for what a convention felt like in the year the old way of choosing nominees blew up, rather than for strategy. It is also the shortest way into 1968 if the longer books feel like too much.
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Fear and loathing on the campaign trail '72 (1973)
Published
McGovern's run against Nixon, 1972
Thompson's Rolling Stone dispatches from the 1972 race, stitched into a book, follow George McGovern's insurgent campaign through the primaries and the manic maneuvering at the Miami convention, with Thompson's loathing of Nixon on every page.
Parts of it are fictionalized, which is why it is best read alongside a straighter account such as The Boys on the Bus. Yet McGovern's campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the least factual, most accurate account of the election, and that is the right way to take it: unreliable on details, right about how a campaign feels from inside.
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The Boys on the Bus (1973)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
The press corps, 1972
The same race as Thompson's, seen through the reporters covering it. Crouse grew the book out of his Rolling Stone articles on life on the road with the press, and shows how they really worked: traveling together, sharing the same briefings and drifting toward the same story.
It was one of the first books on pack journalism, and its diagnosis still holds, which makes it essential for anyone who wants to read the other books here critically. It became a bestseller, and later editions carry a foreword by Thompson.
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Marathon (1977)
Published
Carter's rise, 1972 to 1976
The book on how Jimmy Carter came from outside the national conversation to win the presidency. Witcover traces the 1976 race from its beginnings in 1972, and his central point is that the spread of primaries had turned the pursuit of the presidency into a grueling, years-long ordeal.
That is still how campaigns work, which is the main reason to read it now. Be warned that it runs to more than 650 pages, and at least one reviewer at the time found it short of a point of view. It suits readers who want the mechanics of a primary season in full rather than a story told with flair.
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Blue smoke and mirrors (1981)
Published
Reagan against Carter, 1980
The standard account of Ronald Reagan's win, from two veteran campaign reporters. Germond and Witcover follow it turning point by turning point, from the summer of 1979 through the bitter Carter and Ted Kennedy primary fight to the general election, and show how Carter's hopes of making the race a referendum on Reagan fell short.
It is plainer than the books around it, and one reviewer at the time felt it broke little new ground, but it is the place to go for 1980 if you want the strategy rather than the mythology. The same pair went on to cover the 1984 and 1988 races in later books.
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What it takes (1992)
Published
The 1988 field, both parties
The book aides and journalists cite most often, and the one to choose if you read only one here. Cramer spent six years on it and wrote more than a thousand pages about six men who wanted the job: George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole on the Republican side, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt and Gary Hart for the Democrats.
It is less about strategy than about character: what kind of person puts themselves through a campaign, and what it costs them. The length is the price of entry, and readers coming to it now find extra interest in the Biden chapters, written more than thirty years before he won.
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Up, Simba! (2000)
Published
John McCain's primary challenge, 2000
A novelist's week on a losing campaign. Rolling Stone sent Wallace to travel with John McCain through the final week of the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, the contest McCain lost to George W. Bush. The long version was later reprinted in his collection Consider the Lobster and as a short book titled McCain's Promise.
It is the best thing here on the press and the voter rather than the candidate: how a campaign sells authenticity, and why cynical reporters wanted to believe it. The footnoted, self-conscious style will delight some readers and wear out others, but at book length it is a single sitting.
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Game Change (2009)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Obama, Clinton, McCain and Palin, 2008
The book that defined the modern insider account, and the one to read with the most care. Heilemann and Halperin interviewed more than 300 people involved in the campaign, all on deep background with no one named, and reconstructed private conversations in vivid scene-by-scene detail: the long Obama and Clinton primary fight, John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin and the chaos that followed.
It is gripping and it moved events, including a storm over remarks by Harry Reid about Obama. But critics, the New York Times reviewer among them, warned that some of it simply crystallized campaign rumor. HBO adapted it as a film in 2012.
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Double down (2013)
9.3/10on Open Library
Published
Obama against Romney, 2012
The sequel to Game Change, built the same way and with the same caution attached: more than 400 sources, most of them anonymous. It covers a re-election campaign from the inside on both sides, which few books do, and is strongest on the Republican side, including the vetting that helped steer Mitt Romney away from Chris Christie as his running mate.
Reviewers enjoyed it as a romp through the seedy side of campaigning and complained about its click-bait; both are fair. Read it after Game Change if you want the next installment, and treat the reconstructed private dialogue as one side's memory rather than a transcript.
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Shattered (2017)
Published
Hillary Clinton's defeat, 2016
The fullest account of how the Clinton campaign lost to Donald Trump. Allen and Parnes built it from interviews with campaign staff over a year and a half, granting anonymity in return for access, and their verdict is that the campaign struggled to make voters see her as authentic, leaned on cheaper analysts over current polling and failed to learn from the Sanders and Trump campaigns.
It debuted at number one on the New York Times combined print and digital list. The weakness is the other side: built from inside the Clinton camp, it sees Trump's campaign only from across the field, and some Clinton staff disputed its picture of internal feuding. Read it with Devil's Bargain for both halves of 2016.
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Devil's bargain (2017)
Published
Trump's victory, 2016
The winning side of 2016, told through its strategist. Green, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter, explains the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump that carried them to victory, and the rise of the movement behind it.
It is narrower than a full campaign chronicle, with the primaries and the ground game in the background, but it is the clearest account of the ideas and messaging that made the result look less like a fluke. Reviewers praised it as deeply reported and compulsively readable, and it came out in July 2017, early enough to feel close to events.
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Lucky (2021)
Published
Joe Biden's win, 2020
The Shattered authors again, this time on a winner, and the title is their argument: in their telling, Biden barely won. That framing makes it a useful counterweight to the idea that a victory proves a campaign was well run.
It never made the New York Times bestseller list and sold about 10,000 copies, against roughly 125,000 for Shattered, so it is an underread companion piece. It is most useful for anyone comparing how the same two reporters handled a winning and a losing Democratic campaign four years apart.
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2024 (2025)
Published
Trump against Biden, then Harris, 2024
The strongest account so far of the most unusual race in modern memory. Three political reporters start in August 2022 with the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago and follow both sides through Biden's withdrawal, Kamala Harris's short campaign and Trump's return, drawing on access to the Trump, Biden and Harris teams.
Because it covers winner and loser together, it is the best single book on 2024 for readers who want both campaigns in one place. Its judgments are early ones, written before the archives and memoirs that will test them.
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