ABSTRACT
The resurgence of parties that we have documented in the previous chapters was prominently on display during the historic 2008 election campaign. Although Barack Obama emphasized a new spirit of bipartisanship and John McCain played up his reputation as a maverick who was not afraid to buck his own party’s line, a substantial majority of the public continued to perceive the parties and candidates as very different from one another; and these perceptions of partisan polarization were rooted in real and significant differences between the parties on a host of issues. In this chapter, we provide a narrative of the 2008 campaign and the first months of the Obama administration, drawing attention to the ways party resurgence and party polarization manifested themselves.
