In November of 2005, California voters were ready to terminate Arnold Schwarzenegger as a politician. The state was headed in the wrong direction, they told pollsters, and they didn't want to re-elect their Hollywood governor. The two most likely Democratic challengers held leads over Schwarzenegger, who had just endured a terrible thrashing in a special election he had called. Voters rejected all four ballot measures the governor supported. After less than two years in office, it seemed that the political career of Arnold Schwarzenegger was an experiment gone wrong.Yet just a year later, Schwarzenegger swept to victory, carrying 52 of the state's 58 counties and winning re-election by more than a million-and-a-half votes.Here is the story of that dramatic turnaround, told mostly in the words of California's top political insiders. We learn about the strategies and ideas behind Schwarzenegger's rejuvenation, but also about the two Democrats who sought to take his job: Treasurer Phil Angelides and Controller Steve Westly. In separate chapters, some of California's leading political scholars dissect the underlying political structure of the state, while top pollsters describe the mood of the voters before, during and after the campaign.California is home to one out of every eight Americans, and California gubernatorial campaigns are the nation's second most important and dynamic political races, behind only those for the presidency. Add to that the global celebrity of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it has become essential that anyone who wants to understand American politics must understand California politics. Here is an insider's peek into that world, direct from the men and women who made the decisions that affected the outcome of one of the most-watched American political campaigns in years.

California Votes: The 2006 Governor's Race

Ethan Rarick

Institute of Governmental Studies Press

California voters went back to the future in 2010, picking Jerry Brown as their governor more than 35 years after they first elected him to the office. Brown's election to a third term capped an extraordinary career and life--son of a political dynasty, boy-wonder governor, three-time presidential candidate, volunteer for Mother Teresa, student of Zen Buddhism, radio talk-show host, big-city mayor, and then back to governor for another tenure, this time in his seventies.Brown's victory followed an extraordinary campaign. With a shoestring budget and a skeleton staff, the aging Democratic warhorse defeated a billionaire Republican opponent who poured $144 million of her own money into a year-long advertising blitz overseen by a vast army of well-heeled political consultants. Meg Whitman broke the American record for a self-funded political campaign, but ended up with less than 41 percent of the vote.Here is the story of that campaign--the backroom strategies, the outrageous scandals, the astonishing amounts of money. California Votes tells the tale through the words of the campaign managers who made the decisions, the political pros who followed the action, the pollsters who tracked voter moods, the journalists who wrote about it all, and the scholars who studied the outcome. California voters made political history in 2010. California Votes is the inside story of how and why they did it.

California Votes: The 2010 Governor's Race

California's 2014 election featured Jerry Brown's victory for a fourth term as governor. That length of service is both unprecedented--Earl Warren was elected three times and no one else more than twice and also, at least for now, unrepeatable. Brown served his first two terms in the '70s and '80s before California implemented its lifetime two-term limit for governors, thus allowing his return to the chief executive's office in 2010. Barring a constitutional amendment to revise the two-term limit, no future governor of the Golden State will serve so long. Though interrupted by long periods in the wilderness, Brown's political career will stretch, remarkably, for exactly half a century, from his initial election to the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees in 1969 to his departure as governor on Jan. 1, 2019. Along the way, he will have served not only four terms as governor, but also as California's secretary of state and attorney general and as mayor of Oakland. But the 2014 election featured far more than Brown's victory. This volume adapted from the transcript of the Institute of Governmental Studies traditional California Votes conference examines the state's changing political landscape through the prism of that election. For the first time in the quarter-century history of the California Votes conferences, the focus of the event was expanded beyond the gubernatorial campaign to the full election cycle, and so this book includes expert analyses of the condition of the two major parties, the growth of independent expenditure campaigns, the nonpartisan top-two elections system, the low turnout of the 2014 cycle, and the local campaigns that brought attention to critical issues below the statewide level. California Votes: The 2014 Election is a balanced and careful analysis of a dramatically changing election system in America's largest state, and of the final campaign of an astonishing political career.

California Votes: The 2014 Election

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year’s westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened — and what it tells us about human nature and about America’s westward expansion — remained shrouded in myth.
Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century and a half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner Party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner Party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. “The Donner Party,” Rarick writes, “is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.”
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, Desperate Passage casts new light on one of America’s most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Desperate Passage

History

Americas

BRILLIANCE AUDIO ^

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Books by Ethan Rarick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ethan Rarick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

California Votes: The 2006 Governor's Race

California Votes: The 2010 Governor's Race

California Votes: The 2014 Election

Desperate Passage