The 10 Most Important Presidential Elections in History

Unprecedented: The Election that Changed Everything, by Thomas Lake
With the hottest of hot takes, CNN Politics and Thomas Lake (with a foreword by Jake Tapper) offer up a review of what has turned into one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential campaigns of all time. Offering up “behind the scenes” material gathered by CNN’s reporters during the entire 2016 election, Unprecedented seeks to unravel the messy rhetoric and establish the issues, missteps, and personalities that have been dominating our news cycles for two years now. With the resources of CNN to draw on, this is the book that can made sense of this election as it happened.

The Making of the President: 1960, by Theodore H. White
Arguably the first modern-day political contest, the 1960 election confounded plenty of people who saw on the one hand a young Navy hero with plenty of experience—and on the other, a playboy named John F. Kennedy. The first election where a televised debate between the candidates had a huge perceived impact on the voting public also saw the first Catholic ascend to the presidency. This insightful book breaks down exactly how the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns won—and lost.

The Making of the Prefident: 1789, by Marvin Kitman
Kitman, a humorist, does some pretty amazing historical research with this book detailing how George Washington became our first president—and the publicity machine that evolved around him to ensure it happened despite Kitman wondering how “… a man with no military experience becomes a general? He loses more battles than he wins and becomes a war hero? He has absolutely no political opinions in the most sophisticated intellectual period of our history. He has no ambitions, and he wins?” There’s little doubt that despite Washington running unopposed, the election of 1789 was one of the most important in our country’s history. Kitman makes clear the argument that some aspects of politics never change.

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign, by Edward J. Larson
The election of 1800, with the sitting president running against the sitting vice president, is sometimes referred to as the Revolution of 1800, because it basically changed everything—starting with the friendship between Adams and Jefferson, in ruins after Jefferson was declared the victor. It also established the two-party system we know and…know today, and exposed the fatal flaw of the original system of electoral voting when Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied and the vote had to be settled in the House of Representatives for the first of just two times.

1948: Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America, by David Pietrusza
Everyone has seen the hilarious photo of a victorious President Truman holding up the “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” headline, but what makes the election of 1948 so important today is the reason behind that photo: the disastrously bad polling that had Dewey pegged as a shoe-in for victory. Understanding not just the failure of early polling techniques, but the way a long-shot candidate like Truman pulled together the support necessary for victory, is crucial to understanding every election held since.

Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876, by Roy Jr. Morris
In an election year where talk of rigged elections and other chicanery have dominated the headlines, it’s educational to look back at an election in which rigging certainly occurred. Democratic Governor of New York Sam Tilden received 265,000 more votes than Rutherford B. Hayes, and fell just one electoral vote short of victory. But Southern states, under the control of the Republican Party during Reconstruction, worked to give Hayes the election after four tumultuous months. Seeing how this was actually accomplished is, sadly, necessary information for our modern age.

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory, by David Plouffe
2008 seems like a long time ago—a very long time ago, a time when even bitter political rivals could be civil and respectful. But President Obama’s victory not only surprised the Democratic Party (and Hillary Clinton), it surprised everyone in the United States who had never imagined a black man would be elected president in our lifetimes. Revisit that historic campaign and refresh your soul—and your faith in the democratic process. (Or celebrate the ushering in of the Liberal End Times, depending on your point of view.)

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Abraham Lincoln is often cast as a political saint who saved the union from slavery and dissolution. But Kearns, whose book served as the source material for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, details the political genius that Lincoln brought to both his campaign and the way he assembled a functioning government at one of the most fragile and explosive junctures of American history, revealing the canny operator, ruthless leader, and human being at the core of one of the most important elections in American history.

Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, by Donald A. Ritchie
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932 had such a long-reaching and transformative impact on every aspect of American society, it’s almost impossible to overstate its importance. The first of four times the American people elected FDR to the Oval Office, the campaign of 1932 was fought when the country was at low tide, suffering the effects of the Great Depression and watching the rest of the world spin into war and chaos. It was a time when things could have gone very, very wrong, and the stakes associated with the election could not have been higher.

Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right, by Andrew E. Busch
When people discuss conservative politics in the modern age, the name Ronald Reagan always comes up. The father of the modern conservative movement was considered so unelectable, the Republican Party tried to convince former President Gerald Ford to run as a “co-president” vice presidential candidate to broaden his appeal—but Reagan refused to go along with the plan, and went on to win the election in a landslide, altering American politics forever.