ProPublica began covering this year’s presidential race back in 2022. No, we didn’t send a reporter to Iowa to find out how people feel about Donald Trump, or to try to figure out Nikki Haley’s prospects in New Hampshire. We have long believed that such a story is best left to a national cadre of capable political reporters.
Instead, we turned our attention to Afghanistan, taking a close look at the war’s chaotic final days. Work with Lives in Afghanistan and their reporters in Kabul, we explored the extent to which the Biden administration’s withdrawal actions contributed to the death of 13 US service members in a suicide bombing. Under the heading “Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in Afghanistan”, – the story revealed the typical combination of policy mistakes and miscalculations on the ground that contribute to such tragedies. We concluded that the Biden administration underestimated how quickly the Afghan army would collapse and failed to plan for events that, in retrospect, seemed likely, if not inevitable.
“The shadow of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan hangs over President Joe Biden’s administration as it navigates the conflict in Ukraine,” we wrote. “The widely publicized evacuation chaos caused an immediate drop in Biden’s approval rating, and Republican groups have made it clear they intend to make it an issue in future elections.”
Things did not go as we expected. While Haley, Trump and other Republicans did attack the Biden administration’s actions in Afghanistan, other issues played a much bigger role in the 2024 campaign.
As an organization that specializes in investigative journalism, our role in the political process is somewhat difficult to define. In our mission statement, we say our goal is to expose “abuses of power and betrayal of the public trust,” believing that our stories will spur “reform.” We are a non-profit organization that does not promote any party. When it comes to politics, we focus on the electoral process, the substance of the issues, and the behind-the-scenes forces that stand to benefit from particular outcomes.
Back in 2011, we spent a lot of time figuring out the finer points gerrymandering. We have documented how, in state after state, majority parties have tilted the electoral map in their favor. As we learned, the attractions of gerrymandering were bipartisan. A Democratic supermajority in California was just as likely turn over the cards how Republicans in North Carolina and Florida.
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In the winter of 2016, our reporter Alec McGillis went to have a look what was happening to the Republican Party in Ohio. What he found was the beginnings of a deep schism in which an alienated, politically homeless electorate was perfectly willing to vote for Trump.
“The stresses that drove Trump voters have been building for decades in places like Dayton,” he wrote. “For the most part, the political establishment ignored, dismissed, or ignored these forces until suddenly they destroyed almost everyone’s presidential campaign plan.”
McGillis’s work proved prescient. Rereading it for this column, I was struck again by how important it is to subject conventional wisdom to the stresses of field reporting.
Our efforts to contribute to voters’ understanding of what many consider to be the most consequential election in modern American history have been even more extensive.
One of the key questions we and many others have been trying to figure out is the likely policies of a second Trump administration. In 2016, Trump made his plans clear, announcing his intention to build a wall on the southwest border, ban Muslim immigrants and raise tariffs.
In 2024, the Republican administration’s wish list was assembled under the banner of Project 2025, written by a number of former officials, most of whom worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 or during his first term. The document they prepared was covered in detail by various publications.
Working with our partners at the nonprofit Documented, we received 14 hours of instructional videos which shed more light on what Project 2025 intends to achieve. The Freedom of Information Act contains advice on how to avoid embarrassing disclosures, as well as a range of strategies for defeating bureaucrats in the ‘deep state’. One video that caught our attention was a senior official in Trump’s first administration who said an early task of Trump’s next presidency would be to “eradicate references to climate change absolutely everywhere.”
In a separate collaboration with Documented, we uncovered a speech in which another top Trump aide said the plan was to subject career public servants to “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 election journalism is to write about issues that voters care about. We sent reporters to take a close look at two key issues in this year’s campaign: immigration and abortion.
As Trump put the rink on his opponents in the 2024 primaries, it quickly became clear that immigration would be a major flashpoint for voters. The number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has risen significantly since the lows of the pandemic, and the Biden administration has been slow to respond. Democratic mayors like Eric Adams in New York have publicly criticized Biden as thousands of migrants from countries like Venezuela have poured into cities seeking asylum.
We gathered a team of ProPublica reporters to dig deeper. Micah Rosenberg, our newly hired immigration reporter, and data reporter Jeff Ernsthausen began with a central question: What has changed over the past decade to make this issue such an important part of the American political conversation? Found new samples in the masses of data collected by federal agencies. The composition of migrants traveling to the southwest border has changed dramatically, from mostly single Mexican adults in past decades to an increasing number of families and children from Central America since about 2014. And recently, new migrants are arriving from a much wider range of countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, China and West African countries. We found that the changing face of immigration to America was driven by the policies of Presidents Trump and Biden.
Our analysis of the data showed that the number of migrants crossing the southwest border into the United States was not significantly higher than at other times in history. But the new migrants have been more visible than their predecessors, with many applying for asylum or entering through other legal means rather than trying to avoid arrest at the border. They moved to new cities and towns that in some cases lacked the infrastructure to meet their needs for schools, housing, driver’s licenses and health care. The strains were real, and their impact was greatly 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 moved to Whitewater, and many of them drove without a license or much driving experience. The police chief wrote 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 cops, preferably ones who spoke Spanish. The White House did not respond to the executive’s request for nearly two months, and when it did, it told the executive the program was unavailable to Whitewater. Meanwhile, Trump has turned Whitewater into another flashpoint in his argument that Democrats are ignoring the “invasion.”
Our reporters Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jamil have spent years investigating the role of immigrants in the Wisconsin Dairy Industry. Their story,”What happened in Whitewater,” added more subtle context. Yes, the chief’s initial request for help was ignored. But he eventually got funding to hire more officers, and Whitewater is on its way to integrating new residents.
We did a lot of other reporting related to the election. Our report on women who have died trying to get medical care in states with abortion bans started long before the 2024 campaign got hot. We had no idea that one of these stories would become central political ad shown by Harris-Walz.
A final thought on politics and ProPublica. No one knows what will happen on November 5. Like most American newsrooms, we are projecting multiple outcomes, from a clear victory for either candidate to a major conflict in the courts and possibly state legislatures and Congress. Whatever happens, we’ll be there trying to figure out what’s really going on.
