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"Much has been written about the historic nature of the Obama campaign. The multi-year, multi-billion dollar operation elected the nation's first black president, raised and spent more money than any other election effort in history, and built the most sophisticated voter targeting technology ever before used on a national campaign. But what is missing from these accounts is an understanding of how Obama for America organized its formidable army of 2.2 million volunteers -- over eight times the number of people who volunteered for democratic candidates in 2004. Unlike previous field campaigns that drew their power from staff, consultants, and paid canvassers, the Obama campaign's capacity came from unpaid local citizens who took responsibility for organizing their own neighborhoods months--and even years--in advance of election day. In so doing, Groundbreakers argues, the campaign enlisted citizens in the often unglamorous but necessary work of practicing democracy. Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna argue that the legacy of Obama for America is a transformation of the traditional models of field campaigning. Groundbreakers makes the case that the Obama ground game was revolutionary in two regards not captured in previous accounts. First, the campaign piloted and scaled an alternative model of field campaigning that built the power of a community at the same time that it organized it. Second, the Obama campaign changed the individuals who were a part of it, turning them into leaders. Groundbreakers proves that presidential campaigns are still about more than clicks, big data and money, and that one of the most important ways that a campaign develops its capacity is by investing in its human resources"--

In 2018, far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil by building a socially and geographically heterogeneous electoral coalition. A crucial and largely overlooked part of this coalition were the inhabitants of low-income peripheries in large cities in the Southeast of the country. Throughout the 2000s, these voters tended to vote for the left-leaning Workers' Party in presidential elections, but over the 2010s they shifted electorally to the right. This article maps these shifts and analyses them in relation to major urban, social and institutional transformations. We first present longitudinal electoral data at the scale of electoral zones for the metropolitan areas of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We then present case studies of two peripheral districts, analysing these in relation to a range of key socio-economic and institutional variables. We argue that the peripheries of both metropolises have been subject to common transformations that influenced electoral behaviour, but that there are important differences between peripheral areas that help to explain the varying strength and durability of the rightward turn at the local scale. In dialogue with the theme of this special issue, we argue that that this kind of sensitive socio-spatial analysis helps to situate and add nuance to theories of 'revanchist populism'.

This paper considers the challenges and opportunities of conducting a thick, qualitative study of a twenty-first century presidential ground campaign. Our goals in the study were to describe phenomena that are not commonly examined in most studies of field campaigns, namely (a) the purportedly transformative impact of the campaign on both individuals and collective contexts, (b) the holistic interaction of different strategic elements of the campaign, and (c) the processes the campaign used to develop citizen leadership to scale the campaign. We also consider the limitations of our approach, the reception of a book intended for both academic and practitioner audiences, and underexploited research agendas in the study of campaigns.

Missing from most accounts of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns to elect Barack Obama president is the story of how Obama for America organized 2.2 million volunteers into a grassroots army. Unlike many previous field campaigns that drew their power from staff, consultants, and paid canvassers, the Obama campaign's capacity came from unpaid local citizens who took responsibility for organizing their own neighbourhoods months - and even years - in advance of Election Day. This book describes how they did it.