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Campaigning in a crisis – the race for the US Presidency
How do you campaign when you can’t campaign? In the UK the scheduled May elections were delayed for a year but in the US there is the Presidential and other elections in November and, more trickily a series of primary contests to select candidates. Primaries (and caucuses) select delegates according to candidate. The delegates then…
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Barry Goldwater’s ‘paranoid style’ may yet win Trump the presidency
The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a still widely read 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine outlining what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. Marked by “a sense of heated exaggeration”, suspicion, and wild fears of political conspiracy, it was, he argued, a common part of American political life. It dated back to the rise…
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Trump’s coronation week: what does a presidential convention really achieve?
This year’s Republican National Convention kicked off with a bizarre day. Party delegates openly fought over the convention’s rules, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered a belligerent anti-crime broadside under the banner “Make America Safe Again”, and Donald Trump’s wife Melania addressed the convention only to be accused of plagiarising a speech by Michelle…
