Unsurpassed

Reviews / Votes

While there is no shortage of books on Franklin Roosevelt and on public opinion, Norpoth provides the first fascinating account of Rooseveltas leadership of public opinion. Unsurpassed offers a top-notch empirical examination of the earliest public opinion polls that span the New Deal and World War II and underscores how Roosevelt both influenced and was influenced by these polls. * Lyn Ragsdale, author of The American Nonvoter * Franklin Roosevelt presided over America's entrance into the Second World War and the management of that war. Absent that war context and management, it is a toss-up at best that FDR would have served beyond his first two terms, and not a great bet that the Democrats would have kept winning elections in 1940 and 1944. Norpoth crafts a convincing case for this story in this pioneering analysis of public opinion during the war era. It is an important new look at the history. * David Mayhew, author of The Imprint of Congress * Unsurpassed is rich, almost astonishingly so, in new data, insights, and suggestions about presidential leadership and American public opinion. It revises several long-standing conventions about FDR and the public, and requires political scientists to reformulate more than a few notions about presidential leadership. Was there something about FDR's conduct or the political environment of the time that allowed him to retain a high level of job approval through economic hard times and war events that effectively collapsed later presidencies? Those questions alone would make the book worth reading, but it has much more-including an analysis of partisanship in the emergence of the New Deal Democratic coalition. * John R. Petrocik, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Missouri * This book is recommended for all academic libraries.