ProPublica began its coverage of this year’s presidential race in 2022. No, we didn’t send a reporter to Iowa to check out how people felt about Donald Trump or try to figure out Nikki Haley’s prospects in New Hampshire. We have long believed that such stories were best left to the nation’s talented staff of political reporters.

Instead, we turned our attention to Afghanistan and took a closer look at the chaotic final days of the war. Work together lives in Afghanistan and with its journalists in Kabul, we investigated the extent to which the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal contributed to the deaths of 13 US soldiers in a suicide attack. Titled “Hell at Abbey Gate: Chaos, Confusion and Death in the Final Days of the War in AfghanistanThe story found the typical mix of policy missteps and on-the-ground miscalculations that contribute to such tragedies. We conclude that the Biden administration underestimated how quickly the Afghan Army would collapse and failed to plan for events that, in hindsight, seem likely, if not inevitable.

“The shadow of withdrawal from Afghanistan looms large over President Joe Biden’s administration as it manages the growing conflict in Ukraine,” we wrote. “The widely publicized chaos of the eviction caused a precipitous drop in Biden’s approval ratings, and Republican groups have signaled they intend to make it an issue in future elections.”

Things didn’t go as we expected. While Haley, Trump and other Republicans attacked the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan, other issues appeared to be playing a much larger role in the 2024 campaign.

As an organization specializing in investigative reporting, our role in the political process is somewhat difficult to define. In our mission statement, we say 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 are a nonprofit organization that advocates for neither. party. When it comes to politics, we focus on the electoral process, the substance of the issues, and the behind-the-scenes forces that will benefit certain outcomes.

In 2011, we spent a considerable amount of time researching the intricacies of this topic. gerrymandering. We have documented how the majority parties tilted the electoral maps in their favor in every state. We have learned that the appeal of gerrymandering is bipartisan. The supermajority of Democrats in California was likely to be the same way. shuffle maps aspect Republicans in North Carolina and Florida.

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 was the beginning of a deep divide in which alienated, politically homeless voters were more than willing to vote for Trump.

“The stress creating Trump voters has been building in places like Dayton for decades,” he wrote. “For the most part, the political establishment ignored, ignored, or ignored these forces, until suddenly they destroyed nearly everyone’s presidential campaign plans.”

MacGillis’s work proved prescient. As I reread it for this column, I realized again how important it is to subject conventional wisdom to the stresses of on-the-ground reporting.

Our efforts to contribute to voters’ understanding of what many consider the most important election in modern American history have expanded further.

One of the key questions that we and many others are trying to address is the possible policies of a second Trump administration. Trump made his plans clear in 2016, announcing his intention to build a wall on the southwest border, ban Muslim immigrants and raise tariffs.

In 2024, the wish list for a Republican administration is grouped under the title Project 2025, written by a variety of former officials, many of whom worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign or first term. The document they produced was covered in detail in various publications.

Working with our partners at the nonprofit Documented, 14 hours of training video was obtained This sheds further light on what Project 2025 aims to achieve. There are plenty of strategies for outwitting bureaucrats in the “Deep State,” as well as advice on how to avoid embarrassing revelations via the Freedom of Information Act. One video that caught our eye was of a senior official from the first Trump administration. The first task of Trump’s next presidency will be to “delete climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

In a separate collaboration with Documented, we uncovered a conversation in which a senior Trump ally said the plan was to “traumatize” career civil servants. He said such extreme steps were necessary because the United States was in the middle of a crisis. A. With the “Marxist coming to power” it faced a crisis comparable to 1776 and 1860.

Another primary function of election journalism is to write about issues that voters care about. In our campaign this year, we sent journalists to examine two important issues: immigration and abortion.

As Trump crushed his opponents in the 2024 primaries, it quickly became clear that immigration would be a major flashpoint for voters. The number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border was far higher than at the lowest levels of the pandemic, and the Biden administration was slow to respond. Democratic mayors such as New York’s Eric Adams have publicly criticized Biden as thousands of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela flock to cities seeking shelter.

We assembled a team of ProPublica journalists to dig deeper. Our newly hired immigration reporter, Mica Rosenberg, and data reporter Jeff Ernsthausen started with the basic question: What has changed over the past decade to make the issue such an important part of the American political debate? they found new patterns in the reams of data collected by federal agencies. The mix of migrants traveling to the southwest border has changed radically, from mostly single Mexican adults in past years to increasing numbers of families and children from Central America starting in 2014. And recently, new immigrants have begun arriving from a much broader range. Many countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, China and West African countries. We have seen the changing face of immigration to America spurred by the policies of both President Trump and Biden.

Our data analysis showed that the number of immigrants crossing the southwestern border into the United States is not significantly higher than at other periods in history. But the new immigrants were more visible than their predecessors, as many applied for asylum or took other legal action rather than evading arrest at the border. In some cases, they moved to new cities and towns that lacked the infrastructure to meet their needs for schools, housing, driver’s licenses and medical care. The tensions were real, and their impact was greatly amplified by social media and television.

One of the communities affected by new immigrants was the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Hundreds of Nicaraguans had moved to Whitewater, and many were driving without a license or much experience behind the wheel. The police chief had written a letter to President Biden requesting help. He said he didn’t need much; Just a few hundred thousand dollars to hire a few police officers, preferably a few who can speak Spanish. The White House did not respond to the chief’s request for nearly two months, and when it did, it told the chief about a program Whitewater had no access to. Trump, meanwhile, has turned Whitewater into another flashpoint with his claim that Democrats are ignoring an “invasion.”

Our reporters Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel have spent years researching the role of immigrants in immigration. Wisconsin’s dairy industry. Their story, “What Happened in Whitewater?,” he added more nuanced context. Yes, the chief’s request for first aid was ignored. But he eventually obtained some funding to hire more officers, and Whitewater is on track to integrate its new residents.

We’ve covered countless other election-related stories. Our reporting about women who died trying to seek medical care in states where abortion is illegal It started long before the 2024 campaign got heated. We didn’t know he would star in one of these stories From a political ad released by the Harris-Walz campaign.

One final thought on politics and ProPublica. No one knows what will happen on November 5th. Like most American newsrooms, we are planning for a multitude of outcomes, from a clear victory for either candidate to an attritional clash in the courts and possibly in state legislatures and Congress. No matter what happens, we will be there and try to understand what really happened.