Using manuscript collections, newspapers, periodicals, and other resources, this study explains the decline of political interest and voter turnout in the North during the early twentieth century as the result of a transformation of political style that began in the 1860s. During the mid-nineteenth century, a subjective, demonstrative partisanship, expressed in the press and spectacular election campaigns, made it easy for men to translate their political concerns into the act of voting. Partisanship and its institutional expressions were bound up in popular politics, a political order resting on the participation of all classes.

The first blow against that order came from liberal reformers who formulated a less partisan and democratic conception of politics after the Civil War. By the 'nineties, party leaders had replaced spectacular electioneering with the liberal-inspired "campaign of education"; "independent journalism," another liberal product, threatened the party press. By then, a competing political vision, alike anti-partisan and anti-liberal, flourished in sensational newspapers. After 1896, sensationalism's electoral counterpart, the advertised campaign of personality, challenged educational electioneering. In different ways, these transformations of ideas and institutions made it difficult for Northerners, particularly immigrants, the poor, and the young, to link their political impulses with political action.

In part, changes in leisure, class relations, communal life, business practices, and election laws affected political participation. Unlike disfranchisement in the South, the decline of popular politics in the North was not the result of a direct assault by the wealthy. Yet since the 1860s, the Northern upper class had diminished the role of party in public life and drawn up new rules of political conduct. Partisanship lay at the heart of popular politics; the weakening of the one undermined the other. Most privileged Northerners never intended to reduce turnout, but voting and political interest largely declined as a consequence of their actions.