The presidential election campaign of 1932 has often been considered a watershed in U.S. political history marking the decline of the Republican coalition that effectively had dominated national politics since 1896. In 1932, the Democratic party under Franklin D. Roosevelt created a new majority coalition with 22,821,857 popular votes (472 electoral votes) to the defeated Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover's, 15,761,841 votes (59 electoral votes). New Era Republicans caught up in what one Boston business leader called the slowly sucking maelstrom of the Great Depression lost 103 seats in the House of Representatives and 12 in the Senate, giving Democrats a majority of 313 to 117 in the House and 59 to 35 in the Senate. Ever since, scholars have debated the political and historical significance of the election. In The Nemesis of Reform, Clyde Weed, a political scientist at Southern Connecticut University, joins that debate by arguing that minority party behavior, especially by activists and party elites, has been just as important to completing the process of political realignment as the more commonly studied work of the new majority party. Political historians have built on the work of V. O. Key, Jr.'s idea of critical to create a sizeable literature on the nature, timing, and significance of national elections that have so thoroughly altered the landscape of party politics that we can point to either or, more generally, periods providing a broad overview of how political change has mirrored broader economic, social, or ethnocultural changes. Yet in contradistinction to the work of such well known scholars as Walter Dean Burnham, Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., and James L. Sundquist among others, Weed suggests that realignment theorists have given too much credence to the rationality of vote-maximization-seeking behavior of parties and too little to the more passionate beliefs, rhetoric, and behavior of party elites in minority parties caught in the midst of realigning periods.