Candidates run for office; elections are races. Sports metaphors in politics are so familiar that we hardly notice them. In A Fan's Votes, cultural historian David M. Henkin traces the convergence of mass party politics and commercial spectator sports in America since their simultaneous emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Voters, like fans, know their individual preferences are wildly unlikely to decide the contests they follow, yet they still feel deeply invested personally. Henkin uncovers the history of partisan feeling from the raucous electoral culture of the nineteenth century, when even the disenfranchised could join the team, through Progressive reform to the polarized present. If today's voters seem to act like sports fans, it is not because politics has been trivialized, but because mass democracy powerfully engages its citizens in politics as a spectator sport.