A convincing and well-documented set of winning electoral strategies.
Perron, a veteran political consultant, offers tested methods for defeating incumbents in this nonfiction work.
“This book is about winning elections,” the author declares at the outset as he emphasizes the importance of vibrant campaigns to “the heart and soul of a democracy.” Perron is a TEDx speaker and campaign strategist with almost two decades of experience advising politicians around the world. Central to the book’s thesis is that whether one is running for city council or president of the United States, there are fundamental strategies and best practices that remain constant. It’s a step-by-step guidebook of proven tactics, centered on how to challenge incumbent politicians. Its first chapters call on prospective candidates to conduct an “honest assessment” of the incumbent’s vulnerabilities, recognizing that those in power have a major advantage as known quantities (“voters don’t know what a challenger would really do if elected”). Drawing lessons from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter, among other incumbent defeats, the author argues that turning an election into a referendum can successfully focus attention away from an untested record. Other chapters provide practical tips on messaging, the nuances of “Selling Change,” and crisis management. While discussing the roles of social media and new tools, such as artificial intelligence, the book argues that the “strategic fundamentals of election campaigns” remain the same, even as technology changes. One such fundamental, he says, is a “crystal-clear” knowledge of exactly how many votes a candidate needs to win, and where those votes are.
Perron’s book blends a pragmatic, down-to-earth writing style with scholarly research, based in part on the author’s own experiences running campaigns, as well as a model that he first published in his 2010 doctoral dissertation.It contains ample textbox vignettes, charts, and tables that make for an enjoyable and visually appealing reading experience. The author emphasizes that his tips will work in any campaign against an incumbent, so he draws not only on examples from U.S. presidential elections, but also from contests in France, Ukraine, Brazil, and other places where the author has consulted for politicians. This international outlook, and its attention to elections from the municipal to the federal level, make this a unique contribution to the literature. Partisan and ideologically driven readers may not always appreciate the author’s detached approach that, for instance, never reveals his personal political beliefs or even the names of his clients. Instead, Perron centers on traits and strategies that will work for challengers of all political persuasions. This nonpartisan approach, however, does not mean the book’s perspective is jaded in any way. Indeed, a central theme of the book is its warning to would-be politicians that “the lows as a candidate are really low,” and that challengers need “enough humility to make good decisions.” At just over 200 pages in length, this is an efficient, concise manual that gives aspiring candidates, strategists, and even casual political junkies plenty of stimulating insights into the traits that successful challengers share.
A convincing and well-documented set of winning electoral strategies.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781635768404
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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