The Almanac of American Politics

"This first came out in 1971 and it was written for many years by a journalist named Michael Barone. It was really an amazing book, especially when it first came out. It had 435 chapters, a little essay about each congressional district in the country, who lived there and what it was like. It’s a book that’s been very important to political professionals, but it’s almost like a bit of sociology. If you read a book about contemporary America it will focus on whatever it focuses on, whatever the interests of the author are. Even a book that’s more encyclopaedic, might talk about the 50 states. But the 50 states are different sizes, and some are much bigger than others. By being forced to write a little essay about each congressional district, this book created a geographically balanced portrait of America, which you just could not get anywhere else. And it was just fun to read. Now – you could always tell this but over the years it became more and more of a clear pattern – there is a bit of an ideological bias in the book. Barone is now an outspoken conservative – in fact he embarrassed himself a few years ago by saying that the liberal media had attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby. Then he apologised and said it was a joke. Going back to The Almanac of American Politics , you realise he has a little bit of a thumb on the scale. If he’s talking about a place where people vote for Democrats, it always seems to be a declining, rust-belt, corrupt area, and when it’s an area that’s voting for Republicans, it’s always a dynamic, exciting part of the country. But it’s still amazing. Go back and read some of the early ones especially, and then skip a decade and read it again, and you get a portrait of America that, even if it’s not perfect, is unique. In 1990 when I got my PhD I went to Berkeley into the statistics department. They offered me a few thousand dollars so I could buy a home computer. I said I didn’t want one – I would take the money and buy books instead. This was one of the books on the list. This was the book that, in the old days, every American political scientist would have on their shelf. There’s no substitute. Even Wikipedia is not really a substitute. If you want to look up any particular district, you can look it up, but having a book where every district takes up the same amount of space, there’s just something amazing about it. You might want to look up something you’re personally interested in, like where you live or where you went to college, or where your mother grew up. Or you might open up to anywhere. What’s the 19th district in Illinois like? And it would be this thumbnail portrait of this area of 700,000 Americans, and what makes them vote one way or the other. Of course it has numbers too. It’s a bit like one of these baseball statistics books. You have the description of the player and then his statistics. You can see how the Republicans and Democrats have done in elections in these districts. It is public information if people are registered for a party. If you’re a registered Democrat I should be able to find that out just by going and looking at the public records. I was just reading an autobiography of Ring Lardner Jr. He’s famous for writing the screenplay for M*A*S*H, and he was part of a Hollywood blacklist for many years. He had a story about how the FBI had been following him for decades because they knew how he voted. We’re supposed to have a secret ballot, but in his precinct in Los Angeles he was the only person listed who was neither Democrat nor Republican. When they posted the election results after election day, there were a certain number of people who voted for Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat, and a certain number of people who voted for Alf Landon the Republican, and then there was one vote for the Communist."