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ProPublica began covering this year’s presidential election in 2022. No, we didn’t send reporters to Iowa to find out how people feel about Donald Trump or try to figure out Nikki Haley’s prospects in New Hampshire. We’ve long believed that stories like this are best left to a national cadre of talented political reporters.
Instead, we focused on Afghanistan and took a closer look at the chaotic final days of the war. In collaboration with Alive in Afghanistan and journalists in Kabul, we investigated the extent to which the Biden administration’s withdrawal response contributed to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members by suicide bombers. This article, headlined “Hell at the Monastery Gates: Chaos, mayhem and death in the final days of the Afghanistan war,” reveals the classic combination of policy errors and on-the-ground miscalculations that contributed to such tragedies. It became. We conclude that the Biden administration underestimated how quickly the Afghan military would collapse and failed to plan for an event that in retrospect appears likely, if not inevitable.
“The shadow of an Afghanistan withdrawal looms large as President Joe Biden’s administration navigates the escalating conflict in Ukraine,” we wrote. “The well-publicized evacuation chaos caused Mr. Biden’s approval ratings to plummet, and Republican groups indicated they intended to make this a wedge issue in future elections.”
Things didn’t go the way we expected. While Haley, Trump and other Republicans did attack the Biden administration’s response to Afghanistan, other issues proved to play a much larger role in the 2024 campaign.
As an organization dedicated to investigative journalism, it’s a little difficult to define our role in the political process. We say in our mission statement that our goal is to expose “abuses of power and betrayals of the public’s trust” in the belief that our stories will inspire “reform.” . party. When it comes to politics, we focus on the electoral process, the nature of the issues, and the forces behind benefiting from a particular outcome.
Back in 2011, we spent a considerable amount of time exploring the intricacies of gerrymandering. We documented how state-by-state majority parties tilted electoral maps in their favor. The appeal of gerrymandering turns out to be bipartisan. A Democratic supermajority in California could swing the map as much as Republicans in North Carolina or Florida.
what we see
During Donald Trump’s second term as president, ProPublica will focus on the areas that need the most scrutiny. Here are some of the issues reporters are focusing on and how you can safely reach out to them.
Eli Hager
I cover poverty issues such as housing, labor protections, child welfare, and safety net programs.
I will be watching to see how the next administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit from the poor.
Lennie Dudley
We report on technology and cybersecurity.
Contact me to discuss big technology, AI, and how this country will confront the threat of cyberwarfare. We welcome the opportunity to discuss complex and difficult topics.
joshua kaplan
I will be covering how the U.S. government exercises power abroad, with a particular interest in the intersection of business and foreign affairs.
And I’m always concerned about all forms of conflicts of interest.
melissa sanchez
Reports on immigration and labor in the Midwest.
I would like to speak with people who have information about Mr. Trump’s deportation plans. Who may suffer, who may benefit, and which industries and regions of the country may be left untouched?
We are trying something new. Was it helpful?
In the winter of 2016, Barron’s reporter Alec McGillis set out to find out what was going on with the Ohio Republican Party. What he discovered was the beginning of a deep divide, with politically marginalized and homeless voters willing to vote for Trump.
“The stress that created these Trump supporters had been building up for decades in places like Dayton,” he wrote. “For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed, or overlooked these forces until they suddenly shattered the blueprint for almost everyone in a presidential campaign.”
McGillis’s research proved prescient. Re-reading this book for this column, I realized once again how important it is to expose conventional wisdom to the stress of on-the-ground reporting.
Our efforts to help voters understand what many consider the most consequential election in modern American history go even further.
One of the key issues that we and many others have tried to address are the policies likely to emerge in a second Trump administration. President Trump made his plans clear in 2016, announcing his intention to build a wall on the southwest border, ban Muslim immigration and raise tariffs.
A wish list for a Republican administration in 2024 has been compiled under the banner “Project 2025,” written mostly by former officials who worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign and Trump’s first term. The documents they produced were covered in detail by various news outlets.
In collaboration with our partners at the nonprofit organization Documented, we have obtained a 14-hour training video that sheds further light on what Project 2025 aims to accomplish. There’s also advice on how to avoid embarrassing disclosures through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as a series of strategies for defeating “deep state” bureaucrats. One of the videos that caught our eye was a senior official from the first Trump administration saying: An early challenge for President-elect Trump will be to “completely eradicate all references to climate change from anywhere.”
In a separate collaboration with Documented, we uncovered a speech in which another prominent ally of President Trump said the plan would “traumatize” career civil servants. A “Marxist takeover” took place, and the country faced a crisis comparable to those of 1776 and 1860.
Another important role of journalism in elections is to write about issues that voters care about. We sent journalists to scrutinize two pivotal issues in this year’s campaign: immigration and abortion.
With President Trump overwhelming his opponents in the 2024 primary, it quickly became clear that immigration would be a major issue for voters. The number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border has increased significantly from pandemic lows, and the Biden administration has been slow to respond. Democratic mayors such as New York City’s Eric Adams have publicly criticized Biden as thousands of migrants from countries such as Venezuela have shown up in cities seeking shelter.
We assembled a team of ProPublica journalists to dig deeper. Micah Rosenberg, newly hired immigration reporter and data reporter Jeff Ernsthausen, started with a central question. What has changed over the past decade that has made this issue a prominent part of American political debate? They discovered new patterns in the vast amounts of data collected by federal agencies. The composition of migrants traveling to the southwest border has changed fundamentally, with in past decades mostly single Mexican adults, but starting around 2014 an increasing number of families and children from Central America. And recently, new immigrants have been arriving from a wider range of demographics. Including Venezuela, Haiti, China and West African countries. It turns out that changes in the face of immigration to the United States have been caused by the policies of Presidents Trump and Biden.
What ProPublica reporters will be looking at on Election Day
Our data analysis shows that the number of immigrants entering the United States across the Southwest border was no greater than at other times in history. But many of the new immigrants were more visible than their predecessors because they applied for asylum or entered the country through other legal channels instead of trying to avoid arrest at the border. They moved to new cities and towns, sometimes without the infrastructure to accommodate their needs such as schools, housing, driver’s licenses, and health care. This tension is real, and its impact has been greatly amplified by social media and television.
One of the communities affected by the new immigrants was the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Hundreds of Nicaraguans have moved to Whitewater, many of them driving without licenses or experience. The police chief had written a letter to President Biden asking for help. He said he didn’t need that much, just a few hundred thousand dollars to hire a few police officers, preferably those who could speak Spanish. The White House did not respond to the Secretary’s request for nearly two months, and when it did, it told the Secretary about programs not available to Whitewater. Meanwhile, President Trump has made Whitewater yet another flashpoint in his claims that Democrats are ignoring the “invasion.”
Our reporters Melissa Sanchez and Mariam Jameel have spent years investigating the role of immigrants in Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Their story, “What Happened at Whitewater,” added more nuanced context. Yes, the chief’s first pleas for help fell on deaf ears. But it eventually won funding to hire more staff, and Whitewater is in the process of integrating new residents.
We’ve done countless other election-related reporting as well. Our reporting on the women who died trying to obtain medical care in states where abortion is prohibited began long before the 2024 campaign heated up. We never expected one of these articles to become the centerpiece of a political ad aired by the Harris-Waltz campaign.
Final thoughts on politics and ProPublica. No one knows what will happen on November 5th. Like most American newsrooms, we are planning for multiple outcomes, from a clear victory for one candidate to a bitter showdown in the courts and even statehouses and Congress. No matter what happens, we’ll be there and try to figure out what’s really going on.
