Marjorie Randon Hershey is a professor of political science at Indiana University–Bloomington and is affiliated with the Indiana University School of Philanthropic Studies. She received a PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has taught at Indiana for most of her professional career.  Hershey is the author of the primary textbook on political parties, Party Politics in America (Pearson), now in its sixteenth edition. She has also written two other books about political campaigns and candidates: Running for Office: The Political Education of Campaigners (Chatham House, 1984) and The Making of Campaign Strategy (Heath-Lexington, 1974), as well as more than 40 articles in professional journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Polity, and the Social Science Quarterly, and chapters in edited volumes. Her research centers on the behavior of American political party activists and the degree to which they share views on issues and social-demographic characteristics with less active Americans. She has also published extensively on the ways in which media reports interpret the meaning of election results at the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial levels and the process by which certain types of explanations of those vote totals become widely accepted as “fact,” even in the absence of much evidence to support them.