The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election

In The Obama Victory, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kate Kenski, and Bruce Hardy take a hard look at the campaign, focusing in particular on the roles of media and money within the Obama and McCain campaigns. In the course of a crisp narrative, the authors identify the candidates' key contrastive themes, and then apply them to the five main phases of the campaign: the early summer, the two weeks before the convention, the convention and its aftermath up to the financialmeltdown, the period between the final debate and the penultimate week of the election, and the final week. The authors exploit the extraordinary Annenberg rolling survey, which is one of the best voter data sets in the country. The information culled from this survey-to which they had exclusiveaccess-guides their narrative.