Making Sense of the 2016 Elections: A CQ Press Guide

How did Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination when nearly all the available research suggested it should have been impossible? What can we learn about the factors that drove turnout among key voting blocs? And what issues did voters find important in 2016?

Get a big picture understanding of what happened in the 2016 elections and why. Designed to be used as a supplement to American politics texts, this brief overview from Brian Schaffner and John Clark provides a concise analysis, going beyond horserace journalism, and gives students an accessible insight into political scientists′ view of this ground breaking election. Students will benefit from seeing how broader political science concepts apply to a campaign and election that is fresh in their minds. Whether packaged with another SAGE | CQ Press title or used on its own, Schaffner and Clark’s Making Sense of the 2016 Elections will give your students the key insight they need.

Brian Schaffner is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is also the Founding Director of the UMass Poll and a co-PI for the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Schaffner’s research focuses on public opinion, campaigns and elections, political parties, and legislative politics. He is the coauthor of the book Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, the coeditor of the book Winning with Words: The Origins & Impact of Political Framing, and coauthor of Understanding Political Science Research Methods: The Challenge of Inference. His research has also appeared in over thirty journal articles.

John A. Clark is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Western Michigan University. Clark’s research focuses on political parties, campaigns and elections, legislative politics, and the politics of the American South. He is the coeditor of Southern Political Party Activists and Party Organization and Activism in the American South, which won the 1999 V. O. Key Award as the best book on Southern politics. He has authored or coauthored more than thirty book chapters and articles in scholarly journals. Since 2002, he and Schaffner have coauthored a series of short monographs analyzing the presidential and midterm elections; 2016 marks the eighth in the series.