At only one point does Henry leave the campaign trail to fulfill his promise to examine whyAmerica voted the way it did, rather than how the politicians convinced America to vote the way it did (the former, I believe, is significantly more interesting and important than the latter).
Starting from a description of July Fourth in a New Hampshire town, Henry gives us a whirlwind tour through American pop culture from pies and hot-dogs to Gremlins and Ghostbusters and "The A-Team." What all this means, he tells us, is that America in 1984 is at best individualistic and at worst selfish. These few pages of pop sociology are fine, but they are the only ones in the thousands of pages written about the 1984 election.
Newsweek reveals Nixon's significant role in the Reagan reelection campaign. Germond and Witcover unveil their requisite scoop, that Mondale's campaign staff engaged in some utterly irrelevant shenanaigans that bore a passing resemblance to l'affaire Watergate. To simplify, a Mondale staffer stole and then returned a book tabulating the flow of Pennsylvania labor money through the campaign apparatus to the ostensibly unaffiliated Mondale delegate committees. Though Germond and Witcover lack the requisite irony to appreciate it, the episode says much more about the idiocy of campaign finance law than it does about the ethics of the Mondale campaign.
The uneventful nature of the 1984 campaign should have led someone in the election book biz to look beyond the act of campaigning. In all likelihood that task will be left to Kevin Phillips, whose 1982 Post-Conservative America tells us more about the 1984 election than any work written after the game was played. Phillips pegged the rising influence of a New Right that was not interested in the "conservative" status quo but was instead populist-revolutionary. Given 40 years of New Deal politics, the New Right understood that the status quo was no longer sufficient, and Phillips argues that the coming electoral revolution will render traditional notions of conservatism and liberalism irrelevant.
Post-Conservative America still holds relevance for 1988, when a Republican lacking Reagan's personal charms will have to reconcile what are fundamentally two opposing political ideologies now subsumed under the umbrella of the Republican Party. Phillips does all this without any reliance on the presidential campaigns themselves, which, I think he would argue, are symptoms rather than catalysts of political change.
In terms of the rise of Black political power and the religious right, 1984 was an extremely important electoral year. But neither these nor numerous other political phenomena will be properly understood by readers of the old-fashioned campaign tale.