Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, by Robert Mason

How did the United States voting public make the transition from a solidly Democratic majority based on the liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition to an era of heightened conservatism but no discernable governing party, skipping a major partisan realignment in the process? Robert Mason, in his finely crafted examination of the era of Richard M. Nixon, argues that while the transition started in the early 1960s with the rise of Arizona's conservative Senator Barry Goldwater, it was really Nixon who envisioned the possibility of a major transformation and attempted an ambitious, and risky, strategy to achieve a "new majority" in the United States. That Nixon failed to achieve his vision should not deflect us from recognizing the strategic brilliance that animated this effort.