Just days before Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and Vice President George H. W. Bush faced off for the White House in the 1988 election, journalist Chris Wallace intoned on the Sunday talk show Meet the Press, “a lot of people are saying this has been the worst presidential campaign in memory. The most negative, the worst of choice of candidates.”

Despite that grim assessment, the 1988 race has largely been forgotten — remembered, if at all, through a series of phrases like “Monkey Business,” “No New Taxes,” and “Willie Horton” that operate as floating signifiers with little connection to the election itself. Academics, too, have largely ignored the race, focusing instead on the more significant and realigning elections of 1980 and 1992. In Brutal Campaign: How the 1988 Election Set the Stage for Twenty-First-Century American Politics, historian Robert L. Fleegler sets out to change that view, and in doing so offers an essential reassessment of the neglected contest.

With notable exceptions — think Rick Perlstein’s engrossing trilogy of the rise of the modern US right — books about campaigns have largely been the domain of reporters and insiders, often published in the immediate aftermath of the election. Fleegler lacks the journalistic vantage point of Theodore White (The Making of the President series) or the gonzo style of Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72). But his position of remove enables him to take a scholar’s approach to the topic, culling material from archival sources not available at the time of the election and from interviews with many of the campaign principals, including Susan Estrich (Dukakis’s campaign manager) and Bush adviser Charlie Black (of the infamous firm Black, Manafort, and Stone).