L. Sandy Maisel
Louis Sandy Maisel was an American political scientist. A longtime professor at Colby College, his work focused on U.S. elections and political parties, particularly candidate emergence, or why potential candidates do or do not run for office.
Background
Maisel was born in Buffalo, New York, on October 23, 1945, and was named for his grandfather, Louis Maisel. The son of Sidney Beck and Ruthe Maisel, he was born into a prominent Jewish family in Buffalo. While his father graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, he took over the family's furniture business. One uncle, Sherman J. Maisel, was an economist who served as a governor of the Federal Reserve, while another, David H. Popper, was a diplomat who served as American ambassador to Cyprus and to Chile.Graduating from the Nichols School in Buffalo, Maisel followed his father and uncles to Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1967. He then attended Columbia University, earning a doctorate in political science in 1971. While in school, Maisel served as a deputy campaign coordinator for Buffalo-area U.S. representative Richard D. McCarthy in 1966, worked on McCarthy's 1970 U.S. Senate campaign, and taught political science at Barnard College. He married Mary Lou Michael in 1967, and they raised two children. He would later marry Patrice Franko, an economics professor at Colby College, in 1994.
Career
In 1971, Maisel was hired as an assistant professor by Colby College's department of government, and he would teach there for most of the following fifty years. While there, he was made a full professor in 1983, chaired his department for a collective 18 years, chaired the social science division from 1984 to 1987, was named the CASE Maine professor of the year in 1989, and held named professorships from 1989 until his death. Positions he held at other institutions included visiting professorships at the University of Melbourne and Monash University in 1975, Harvard University in 1987–1988, Stanford University in 1993–1994 and 2013, and the University of London in 2002; Fulbright fellowships in the Philippines in 1998 and Brazil in 2012; and a guest scholar position with the Brookings Institution in 1999.Continuing his political activism in his new home state, Maisel served as a delegate to the 1972 and 1976 Democratic National Conventions. He also worked on the 1972 senate campaign of William Hathaway, in which he defeated longterm incumbent Margaret Chase Smith. In the 1978 elections, he ran for Maine's 1st congressional district, seeking the Democratic nomination. In December 1977, the Maine Secretary of State ruled that he would be listed on the ballot as 'Louis Maisel', his legal name. Maisel, who had been known as 'Sandy' since childhood, had his legal name changed to Louis Sandy Maisel to alter how his name would appear on the ballot, deciding that was easier than challenging the secretary's decision in court. While he lost the primary, in 1982, he would detail the campaign, in which he visited 156 communities and drove over 20,000 miles, in a book, titled From Obscurity to Oblivion: Running in the Congressional Primary. The book, for which Maisel surveyed over 250 other candidates who ran in contested 1978 congressional primaries, received generally positive reviews and was one of the first works to examine the candidate recruitment process.
After editing a series of electoral studies books for SAGE Publications, Maisel held numerous editorial positions, including sitting on the editorial boards of American Politics Quarterly, Polity, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Political Research Quarterly. He would also serve as president of the New England Political Science Association in 1994–1995, and on the council of the American Political Science Association in 1989–1991 and 2000–2002. Authoring and editing numerous works on candidate emergence as well as U.S. elections, campaigns, and political parties, he became a noted expert in the field as well as a political commentator.