The rules of the game are simple for the voter, but for the strategist and politician, it can be a nightmare. This is particularly true in America because even though a political landscape is always bound to shift, in the U.S. it doesn’t happen every couple of decades; it likes to go through this evolutionary process during the course of a single presidency. It only took four years of Hoover to launch the Democrats on their path to stardom. It only took four years of Carter to give birth to a new conservatism. It only took four years of Adams to murder conventional federalism. And, perhaps most impactful, it only took eight years of Obama to completely reshape the Republican Party.
