This is the rare political science book that is accessible to a general audience and also makes a significant scholarly contribution to the field. Indeed, The Obama Victory interweaves a masterful yet highly readable account of day-to-day communications content throughout the general election campaign with results from the National Annenberg Election Survey's (NAES) rolling cross-sectional telephone canvass of 57,000 respondents in order to document how the candidates' messages shifted public opinion in the historic 2008 presidential contest.

In the first part of the book, Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson describe how the McCain and Obama campaigns devised their strategies within a political environment in which record low-approval ratings of the incumbent Republican president and the nation's rapidly deteriorating economic conditions overwhelmingly advantaged the Democrats. Not surprisingly, then, the Obama camp went to great efforts to paint their opponent as an “out-of-touch” third-term extension of the Bush administration (e.g. the “McSame” moniker). The McCain campaign, meanwhile, attempted to overcome the disadvantaged hand that the election-year fundamentals had dealt it by portraying its less-experienced Democratic opponent as a risky, tax-and-spend liberal who was not ready to lead the country in tumultuous times. This section not only provides a thorough account of the way these strategies manifested themselves in the two campaigns' respective content but also insightfully discusses how such messages about John McCain being out of touch and Barack Obama being “radical” may have activated stereotypical concerns related to McCain's age and Obama's race.

Part II then marshals the NAES rolling cross section to make a plausible case that changes in campaign message dynamics were responsible for the distinct shifts in the candidates' poll numbers over the course of the election year. The authors, to briefly summarize, argue that McCain gained ground in the summer months preceding the Democratic convention in large part because of skyrocketing gas prices, which had made Republicans' popular policy of expanding off-shore drilling salient (Period One). Obama momentarily regained the advantage in Period Two with a successful nominating convention, only to quickly lose it in the immediate aftermath of Sarah Palin's well-received speech before the Republican National Convention. Senator McCain's presidential hopes all but vanished in the postconvention period (September 10–October 14), though, as the financial collapse refocused voters' attention on both the economy and the incumbent party's performance over its last eight years in the White House. McCain's initial response to the crisis, in which he stated that “fundamentals of the economy are strong,” along with growing concerns about his vice-presidential selection and reassuring debate performances by Obama and Biden, also helped the Democratic ticket turn their postconvention polling deficit into an almost insurmountable lead heading into the final weeks of the campaign.

The book's final section, while surely less enjoyable for a general audience to read than the engaging campaign narratives in Parts I and II, probably makes its most significant contribution to the scholarly literature on campaigns and elections. Chapter 11 sheds much-needed light on the ways in which the dramatic increase in pre–Election Day voters from an estimated 14% of the electorate in 2000 to 20% in 2004 to 34% in 2008 may have affected the election outcome. In particular, the “chapter suggests that no-fault absentee and early voting altered the chemistry of the 2008 election by both putting new voters in the Democratic column and by giving Obama a small but discernable cushion of votes in early voting states as an insurance against a last-minute McCain comeback” (p. 264). Like prior studies by Annenberg researchers, Chapter 12 also offers a number of important insights into campaign ad expenditures and how they translate into the candidates' aggregate vote tallies. Consistent with that previous research, the chapter finds that an advantage in ad exposure can swing a close election. Moreover, the authors convincingly argue that cable and radio expenditures are more closely linked to vote margins than are TV broadcast ads because campaigns can effectively narrowcast messages in those mediums to persuadable voters.

Of course, no book is perfect. And my biggest critique of this one is that the authors often put forth causal relationships that are highly endogenous. For example, did McCain's position on off-shore drilling really help him gain traction against Obama in August, as the authors claim (p. 120)? Or was support for off-shore drilling linked to a favorable rating for McCain because voters learned his position and changed their feelings toward the issue in accordance with prior support for his candidacy? (E.g., see Gabriel S. Lenz, “Learning and Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Evidence for the Priming Hypothesis,” American Journal of Political Science 53 [2009]: 821–37.) Likewise, did watching the candidates' convention speeches actually make voters feel more positively about them, as the authors repeatedly claim? Or, even in the presence of stringent controls, were respondents who tuned in to watch the candidates' respective convention speeches still more disposed to liking them than their otherwise similar nonwatching counterparts? These questions, and similar ones that could be asked about several additional analyses in the book, are virtually impossible to answer with the cross-sectional data utilized. Consequently, I would like to have seen the authors augment results from their 2008 NAES rolling cross-section survey with their equally impressive 2007–8 NAES five-wave panel survey of more than 20,000 respondents in order to try to unpack the causal relationships between campaign content and opinion change over the course of the 2008 campaign.

Regardless of that critique, though, The Obama Victory will rightfully go down as the authoritative account of the 2008 Election. For not only does it thoroughly document the campaign's content, but it also offers empirical evidence from an incomparable data set to demonstrate how those campaign dynamics likely affected public opinion and voter preferences during the election year. This book is a must-read, then, for anyone interested in campaigns and elections in general and the 2008 election in particular.