As we head into the final stretch of the 2018 midterm election season, I thought I’d share five interesting, well-written, and engaging books that I’ve read recently, books that might provide some useful context for the midterms.
The first is Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States. Don’t be intimidated by this book’s length (it’s 960 pages!), as it’s highly engaging, and written in a style that is quite easy to read. I’m impressed by Lepore’s ambition (covering American history in 960 pages), and by the way she weaves through the book detailed stories of many of the personalities behind the important events she covers. This book provides great context for this important midterm election.
A second book is Ron Chernow’s Grant. This is also an imposing book, just over 1000 pages (I read parts some, listened to most). I enjoyed this book, mainly as there is a lot of Grant’s story that I didn’t know well, especially his role in the western theater of the Civil War, and the events of his presidency. Reading this book, I was struck by a number of parallels to current politics, and it was quite interesting to read about Grant’s personal and professional struggles, and how he resolved many of the issues he encountered as a person, a military leader, and as president.
Third, I recommend David Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. Sanger covered the Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election at the New York Times, and this book provides both great context for the evolution of cyberwar, he carefully and thoroughly discusses what is known about the attempts to manipulate the 2016 elections. As many of you know, we’ve been working on election security for a long time, and a particular focus of our recent research at Caltech has been on developing methodologies for detecting attempts at manipulating voter registration databases. Sanger’s book is a readable resource for anyone trying to understand the security risk that election administrators face.
The next two books are more academic in nature, but I’ve been fielding a lot of questions recently about these topics, so I thought I’d put a book about voter turnout and about polling on this list.
So regarding voter turnout, the best contemporary book on the subject was written by my colleagues Jan E. Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States. If you really want to know why people in the U.S. vote, why they don’t vote, and why it matters — you should read Leighley and Nagler. I have a well-read copy in my office, and I find that I refer to their book quite frequently. They are the experts on voter participation, having studied for decades why people vote and why the don’t vote, and their book provides the best analysis of this important subject that I’m aware of.
Then there is polling. In 2016 there were many issues with the public polls, especially those trying to gauge voter turnout and sentiment in the final weeks of the election in the battleground states. Polling and survey methodology is in a state of flux; the traditional methods of sampling and contacting respondents (like random-digit dialing) are under considerable scrutiny, and academics and professional pollsters are turning to many different types of respondent-driven survey approaches. The best resource today for understanding the current state of polling and survey methods is the Oxford Handbook of Polling and Survey Methods, which I edited with Lonna Atkeson. It’s a hefty handbook, and it’s not cheap, but it surveys the landscape of polling and survey methods from sampling, to questionnaire design, survey implementation, and the analysis/presentation of survey results. If you have a question about polling or surveying, the answer is likely to be in this handbook.
Okay, so perhaps you were looking for me to recommend some books that weren’t political history, about cyberwar, or academic treatments of turnout and polling. If so, here’s a few quick suggestions. For the past few years, I’ve taken the suggestion of Nick Hornby and journaled all of the books that I’ve started, keeping track of the ones I’ve read and enjoyed, those I’ve read and not enjoyed, and those I didn’t finish. Here are five works of fiction; if you are looking for something to keep your attention away from the midterm elections. Five of my favorite recent fiction reads, in no particular order, are: Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing; Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone; Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts; Sebastian Barry, Days Without End; and George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo.