ProPublica launched its coverage of this year’s presidential race back in 2022. No, we didn’t send a reporter to Iowa to check out how people were feeling about Donald Trump or try to figure out Nikki Haley’s prospects in New Hampshire. We’ve long believed that sort of story is best left to the nation’s cadre of capable political reporters.
Instead, we turned our attention to Afghanistan, taking a close look at the chaotic final days of the war. Working with Alive in Afghanistan and their journalists in Kabul, we explored the extent to which the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal contributed to the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemen in a suicide bombing. Headlined “Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in Afghanistan,” the story found the typical mix of policy missteps and on-the-ground miscalculations that contribute to such tragedies. We concluded that the Biden administration had underestimated how quickly the Afghan Army would collapse and failed to plan for events that, in retrospect, appeared probable if not inevitable.
“The shadow of the Afghanistan withdrawal looms large over the administration of President Joe Biden as it navigates the growing conflict in Ukraine,” we wrote. “The widely publicized chaos of the evacuation caused an immediate drop in Biden’s approval ratings, and Republican groups have signaled they intend to make it a wedge issue in future elections.’’
Things didn’t turn out as we anticipated. While Haley, Trump and other Republicans did attack the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan, other issues turned out to play a much larger role in the 2024 campaign.
As an organization that specializes in investigative reporting, our role in the political process is a bit hard to define. We say in our mission statement that our goal is to expose “abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust” in the belief that our stories will spur “reform.’’ We're a nonprofit that doesn't engage in advocacy for either party. When it comes to politics, we focus on the process of elections, the substance of issues and the behind-the-scenes forces that stand to benefit from particular outcomes.
Back in 2011, we spent considerable time digging into the intricacies of gerrymandering. We documented how, in state after state, majority parties tilted electoral maps in their favor. The attractions of gerrymandering, we learned, were bipartisan. The Democratic supermajority in California was just as likely to jigger the maps as the Republicans in North Carolina and Florida.
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We’re ProPublica, a nonprofit, independent newsroom with one job: to hold the powerful to account. Here’s how we’re reporting on democracy this election season:
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In the winter of 2016, our reporter Alec MacGillis set out to see what was happening to the Republican Party in Ohio. What he found were the beginnings of a profound split, in which an alienated, politically homeless electorate was quite willing to vote for Trump.
“The stresses that created these Trump voters had been building for decades in places like Dayton,’’ he wrote. “For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed or overlooked these forces, until suddenly they blew apart nearly everyone’s blueprint for the presidential campaign.’’
MacGillis’ work proved prescient. Rereading it for this column, I was struck again by how important it is to subject the conventional wisdom to the stresses of on-the-ground reporting.
Our efforts to contribute to voters’ understanding of what many see as the most consequential election in modern American history have been even broader.
One key question we and many others tried to address is the likely policies of a second Trump administration. Trump had been clear about his plans in 2016, announcing his intentions to build a wall on the southwest border, ban Muslim immigrants and raise tariffs.
In 2024, the wish list for a Republican administration was assembled under the banner of Project 2025, written by an assortment of former officials, most of whom had worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign or in his first term. The document they produced was covered in detail by various outlets.
Working with our partners at the nonprofit Documented, we obtained 14 hours of training videos that shed further light on what Project 2025 intends to accomplish. There is advice on how to avoid embarrassing disclosures through the Freedom of Information Act along with reams of strategies for vanquishing the bureaucrats in the “Deep State.’’ One video that caught our eye was a senior official in the first Trump administration who said an early task of the next Trump presidency would be to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’’
In a separate collaboration with Documented, we uncovered a speech in which another top Trump ally said the plan was to put career civil servants “in trauma.’’ Such extreme steps were necessary, he said, because the United States was in the midst of a “Marxist takeover’’ and faced a crisis comparable to 1776 and 1860.
Another key function of journalism in elections is to write about the issues voters care about. We’ve dispatched journalists to scrutinize two pivotal issues in this year’s campaign: immigration and abortion.
As Trump steamrollered his opponents in the 2024 primaries, it quickly became clear that immigration was going to be a major flash point for voters. The numbers of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border were way up from their pandemic lows, and the Biden administration had been slow to react. Democratic mayors like New York’s Eric Adams were publicly criticizing Biden as thousands of migrants from countries like Venezuela were showing up in cities looking for shelter.
We assembled a team of ProPublica journalists to dig deeper. Mica Rosenberg, our newly hired immigration reporter, and data reporter Jeff Ernsthausen began with the central question: What changed in the past decade to make the issue such an important part of the American political conversation? They found new patterns in the masses of data collected by federal agencies. The mix of migrants traveling to the southwest border had radically changed, from mostly single Mexican adults in decades past to an increasing number of families and children from Central America starting around 2014. And more recently, new migrants have been coming from a much broader array of countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, China and West African nations. We found that the changing face of immigration to America had been set in motion by the policies of both Presidents Trump and Biden.
Our data analysis showed that the number of migrants crossing the southwest border into the United States was not vastly higher than in other periods of history. But the new migrants were more visible than their predecessors, as many applied for asylum or entered through other legal pathways instead of trying to escape arrest at the border. They have moved to new cities and towns that, in some cases, lacked the infrastructure to deal with their needs for schools, housing, driver’s licenses and medical care. The strains were real, and their impact was vastly magnified by social media and television.
One of those communities affected by the new migrants was the tiny town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Hundreds of Nicaraguans had moved to Whitewater, and many of them were driving without licenses or much experience behind the wheel. The police chief had written a letter to President Biden asking for help. He said he didn’t need much — just a few hundred thousand dollars to hire a couple of police officers, preferably some who could speak Spanish. The White House did not respond to the chief’s request for close to two months, and when it did it told the chief about a program unavailable to Whitewater. Meanwhile, Trump turned Whitewater into yet another flashpoint in his argument that Democrats are ignoring an “invasion.’’
Our reporters Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel had spent years exploring the role of immigrants in Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Their story, “What Happened in Whitewater,’’ added more nuanced context. Yes, the chief’s initial plea for help went unheeded. But he eventually did get some funding to hire more officers, and Whitewater is on its way to integrating its new residents.
We’ve done a myriad of other reporting that figures in the election. Our reporting on the women who died trying to obtain medical care in states with abortion bans began long before the 2024 campaign turned white hot. We had no idea one of those stories would end up as the centerpiece of a political ad aired by the Harris-Walz campaign.
A final thought on politics and ProPublica. No one knows what’s going to happen on Nov. 5. Like most American newsrooms, we’re planning for multiple outcomes, from a clear victory by either candidate to a grinding conflict in the courts and, possibly, in state legislatures and the Congress. Whatever happens, we’ll be there, trying to figure out what’s really happening.
