Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates. This item is unavailable.Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates

The 2016 presidential primaries are on the horizon and this new edition of Elaine Kamarck's Primary Politics will be there to help make sense of them. Updated to include the 2012 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system and some of its arcana, including the ""robot rule.""

In Primary Politics, political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today. Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation.

Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics - how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.

Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the Director of the Management and Leadership Initiative at Brookings. She is a public sector scholar with wide experience in government, academia and politics. Kamarck is an expert on government innovation and reform in the United States, OECD countries and developing countries. In addition, she also focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in many American presidential campaigns. In the 1980s, she was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, also known as reinventing government.