Counting Every Vote
The Most Contentious Elections in American History
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The 2000 U.S. presidential election was not the first in American history that was exceptionally close or that produced highly disputed results. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson became president after an electoral gridlock, but only after Congress voted three dozen times to select the president. Charles Hughes lost in 1916 to Woodrow Wilson by losing in California by some 3,000 votes. In 1960 John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by only a fraction of a percentage point in a very controversial election.
What would have happened if Aaron Burr, rather than Jefferson, had become president? What if Nixon had defeated Kennedy in 1960? What if Al Gore had become president in 2001 instead of George W. Bush? Using six cases, political scientists Robert Dudley and Eric Shiraev argue that engaging in this counterfactual exercise provides an excellent opportunity to revisit history, learn from its lessons, and relate to contemporary elections.
The authors’ aim is not to prove that their suggested scenarios would have certainly happened, but merely to show that they might have, and therein lies the importance of voting. Every vote counts, and the consequences can be enormous.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In six elections, authors and professors Dudley and Shiraev relive, to surprisingly dull effect, the contests that most divided the American people. Perhaps you had to be there; probably the most exciting contest is the 2000 presidential election in which Bush took Gore to the Supreme Court and introduced America to "the chad." The authors also capture some of the thrill of 1960's Kennedy-Nixon race, in which Kennedy famously took Illinois with only nine of the 99 counties. Following the specifics of each case, the authors speculate on how the results might have been reversed and what it would have meant for history. But even those speculations prove tame: if Humphrey had beat Nixon in the 1968 campaign, for example, the authors conclude that he would have tried to end the Vietnam war prior to 1972 and on America's terms. Further, the authors themselves conclude that "close elections had a negligible impact on the course of history"; this slight read has all the facts, but fails to find the heart of the conflict.
