This easy-to-use handbook presents a fascinating and fresh take on American presidential elections and makes a wide range of statistics available to serious researchers and political fanatics alike.

Counting the Votes: A New Way to Analyze America’s Presidential Elections isn’t your typical history book about presidential elections. Nor is it like most statistical analyses of election results. What this unusual book does offer is an array of innovative statistics-campaign score (CS), potential index (PI), return on potential (ROP), and equalized vote totals (EV*EQ), among others-that provides a provocative, intriguing, and fresh perspective on past presidential candidates and campaigns.

Presenting information that has never been compiled and presented before, author G. Scott Thomas provides reams of statistics for all 57 presidential elections (1789 to the present) as well as essays inspired by those races that explore new interpretations of electoral trends. The book also includes lists of outstanding political performances in 179 statistical categories in addition to complete statistical records for 289 presidential candidates. The unique information and metrics introduced in this book will be invaluable to historians, political scientists, and students who are conducting research into voting trends and will serve as additional tools for their work.

Includes a Record Book of Presidential Politics that spotlights the best and worst performances by presidential candidates highlighted in 179 statistical rankings, identifying which nominee was the youngest, came from the smallest state, and won by the smallest margin of popular votes

Written by an accomplished journalist with more than three decades of experience and who has authored four books focused on national politics

Provides an alphabetical directory of the career records of 289 presidential candidates between 1789 and 2012 presented in tabular form for easy reference