Draws on interviews with major political leaders in an account of Ted Kennedy's 1980 campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination instead of incumbent Jimmy Carter that discusses how their rivalry reflected significant party changes.

"The inspiring story of an unlikely political partnership--between a to-the-manor-born Protestant and a Lower East Side Catholic--that transformed the Democratic Party and led to the New Deal In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Democratic Party was bitterly split between its urban machines--representing Catholics and Jews, ironworkers and seamstresses, from the tenements of the northeast and Midwest--and its populists and patricians, rooted...

"This book began as a political history of the 60s and 70s, with a particular focus on why Americans have let our nation decline in almost every measurable way since then, and sometimes even cheered on those who engineered that decline. I wanted to tell it the way I saw it growing up, watching many of my working-class Irish relatives forsake the Democrats, a party they saw as forsaking them. But my family's story, and that of the Democratic Party,...

"In 1992, Carol Moseley Braun became the first, and to this day only, African-American woman elected to the US Senate. Long before this historic victory, which Barack Obama would later say prefigured his own path to the Senate and presidency, veteran Chicago journalist Jeannie Morris saw an incredible opportunity. Here was a bold and politically courageous candidate, a feminist and sensible progressive with whom Morris quickly identified on a personal...

Three generations of the Behls, a politically ambitious family in Washington. The three men are Adolph, a senator during the 1930s and failed vice-president; his son, Axel, a World War II OSS agent and later a Cold War warrior; and Alec a successful lawyer and lobbyist during the reign of President Kennedy. By the author of Ambition and Love.

The 1948 election was a war for the soul of the Democratic Party, with accidental president Harry Truman pitted against Henry Wallace, his embittered left-wing predecessor as vice president, and young South Carolina segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. On the GOP side, it's a four-way battle between cold-as-ice New Yorker Tom Dewey, Minnesota upstart Harold Stassen, stodgy but brilliant Ohio conservative Robert Taft, and imperious but aged Douglas...

What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation. The United States has scores of potential issues and ideologies but only two major political parties. How parties respond...