The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign

The idea of the "permanent campaign" is not a new one, but no scholar to date has delved into the detail of what that means for U.S. presidents to the degree that Doherty (political science, U.S. Naval Acad.) has done here. His book is based primarily on a database constructed through careful examination of the public papers of U.S. presidents from Carter through Obama to gather empirical evidence on the frequency, nature, and location of presidential fund-raising events over those years. Doherty found that both travel and fund-raising have risen sharply across the administrations he studied, and that "battleground" states are disproportionately the destinations when a president travels from the White House. Doherty's archival research on the rise of the White House Office of Political Affairs corroborates these data.