Ben Wattenberg and the Changing 'Real Majority'

When I attended a funeral service last week for Ben Wattenberg, it really hit me how much our country and politics have changed in the 45 years since he and Richard Scammon wrote The Real Majority, a landmark, best-selling book analyzing the American electorate and voter behavior. The book had been published two or three years before it was assigned reading in my freshman college class on government, so I had missed the substantial publicity it initially received. But when I began reading, I realized it was an eye-opening and mind-expanding book that needed to be written. I later had a boss who suggested that everyone in politics should read two books each year, The Real Majority and historian T. Harry Williams's incredible biography Huey Long. I would now add Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro's (so far) four-volume set The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Scammon served as director of the Census Bureau and then headed election analysis for NBC News for two decades, before he passed away in 2001. Wattenberg had been a speechwriter for President Johnson and later a