Alec MacGillis
I have been reporting for ProPublica since 2015, most recently covering the post-pandemic schools crisis.
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What I Cover
In recent years, I have covered gun violence, economic inequality and the post-pandemic crisis in public education.
My Background
I worked for six newspapers, including The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. In 2011, I switched to magazines, at The New Republic, before arriving at ProPublica in 2015. My work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, among others. I won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting and the 2017 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award. A resident of Baltimore, I am the author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell” and “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”
Revenge of the Forgotten Class
Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were playing with fire when they effectively wrote off white workers in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt.
Would Wall Street Have a Place in a Clinton Administration?
If Clinton is elected she could face a fight with her party’s most liberal wing over potential top hires like Tom Nides, who has spent his career straddling government and high finance.
The Democrats’ Bad Map
Hillary Clinton looks increasingly likely to win the White House, but her party faces a big obstacle to success in congressional races — Democrats are sorting themselves into geographic clusters where many of their votes have been rendered all but superfluous.
Fact-checking Trump and Clinton on the Billionaire’s Tax Break
When the presidential candidates vowed on Sunday to eliminate the “carried-interest” loophole, they left out some important context.
How Washington Blew Its Best Chance to Fix Immigration
Three years ago, the Republican-led House was close to reaching a compromise on immigration. This is the inside story of what went wrong.
The Surreal Politics of a Billionaire’s Tax Loophole
Hillary Clinton has gone even further than Donald Trump in promising to kill a tax break that benefits some of the wealthiest people in finance. So why are private equity titans giving all their campaign money to Clinton?
‘White Trash’ — The Original Underclass
Waste people. Rubbish. Clay-eaters. Hillbillies. Two new books that reckon with the long, bleak history of the country’s white poor suggest their plight shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country off guard.
The Great Republican Crack-up
Dayton was once a bastion of the GOP establishment. The story of how the city changed helps explain the rise of Donald Trump.
How Philanthropist David Rubenstein Helped Save a Tax Break Billionaires Love
A private equity mogul lauded for patriotic donations has quietly worked to protect one source of his wealth — the carried-interest loophole.
The Referendum That Might Have Headed Off Flint’s Water Crisis
Michigan’s voters decided to scrap the kind of super-empowered emergency managers who made questionable decisions in Flint – but state lawmakers found a way to revive the program.