bq. The Obama victory was historic, but it was not surprising; Obama shifted, but did not redraw, the electoral map; race and class mattered, but not in the way people assumed they would matter; and partisan loyalty was powerful even as partisan defections like Colin Powell’s garnered headlines. Furthermore, it is simply too soon to tell how and how much campaign tactics mattered, whether this election’s outcome constitutes a realignment in voting behavior, and whether Obama has emerged with a mandate.
Andy and I have a new piece on the 2008 election in the upcoming _Boston Review_, which is now available on-line. The paragraph above summarizes its basic conclusion.
The piece grew out of our collective blogging on the 2008 election. Essentially, we distilled our blog posts and related (numerous) graphs into a longish document, which was then made much more coherent by Joshua Cohen, Deborah Chasman, and Simon Waxman of the _Boston Review_. I learned two lessons in the process. First, if anyone seeks an outlet for scholarly research rendered in a “popular” form, I can highly recommend the _Boston Review_. It is quite a pleasure to work with real editors who care about the social science and also can make it readable, as Josh, Deborah, and Simon do and did.
Second, for me, writing this piece confirmed even more the value of blogging. Thanks to this blog and Andy’s own blog, we could not only publish our interpretations of the campaign and the election outcome in “real time,” but also produce a coherent summary of those interpretations more easily than if we had written this article entirely from scratch. In short, blogging creates certain efficiencies: you fire off a quick posts and then over time those posts can accumulate into something more meaningful.
In the next several weeks, the _Boston Review_ will publish several responses to our piece from other scholars, as well as reply from Andy and me. I’ll link to those when they are available.