Regular readers will note that, as in 2008, I’ve been doing a lot of campaign-related blogging, both here and at Model Politics. For once, it’s going to serve a larger purpose than this.
I’m pleased to say that UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and I will be writing a book on the 2012 election, now under contract with Princeton University Press. An earlier UCLA press release about the book is here.
We are going to try something unusual with this book — at least by academic standards. We plan to publish the book in the summer of 2013, fast enough so that it can enter the conversation alongside journalists’ post-mortems. A final draft of the manuscript is due by the end of 2012.
Princeton will also be publishing the first 2 chapters in electronic form in August 2012. These chapters will deal with the (1) political and economic landscape as the campaign got under way, and (2) the GOP primary. Hopefully they will serve to generate some interest and discussion. Of course, if the GOP primary doesn’t end soon, we can’t promise anything.
The linchpin of the book’s data analysis will be the national surveys that YouGov has been conducting and that we have been writing about at Model Politics. Because these data are arriving weekly, we can do analysis in real time and incorporate it quickly into the manuscript. We are grateful to Doug Rivers, Adam Myers, and others at YouGov for their support and assistance.
We are also grateful to Chuck Myers and Princeton Press for helping to plan and execute a project that’s a bit different for an academic press. To pull this off, Chuck has recruited reviewers who will read and comment on chapters as they are written. We thank them, whoever they made be.
In the meantime we will continue to blog regularly, treating each blog post as a rough draft of some portion of the book. We may also do some further traveling — as we did to the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary — which we will report on as well. We would be grateful for any feedback on these blog posts, via email or in comments, so that we can refine and improve on the analysis and narrative.
You can also follow some of what we’re writing on Princeton Press’s Election 101 blog. In addition, it will feature lots of other election-related posts by Princeton Press authors or about their work– e.g., on Latinos in 2012, distrust of the media, and the ground war.
Stay tuned.