The 19th Amendment, explained / March 2025
The complicated story of women’s suffrage is a winding road, from the early conventions that catapulted the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony into national acclaim to the ultimate adoption of the amendment that resulted in the single largest expansion of voting rights in American history. There is no clear starting point, though many identify the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 as the dawn of the movement. As far back as the late 1830s, the push for women’s suffrage was deeply intertwined with the movement to abolish slavery.
A fight for representation in Galveston / June 2024
As a Black girl growing up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, Edna Courville watched as her parents were made to pay $2 in poll taxes and recite the preamble to the Constitution before casting a ballot. The racist tactics used to disenfranchise minority voters back then only made voting that much more part of Courville’s DNA by the time she turned 18. Now a grandmother in coastal Galveston County, Texas, Courville is part of a multiracial coalition of voters taking on a different, more surgical tool of racial discrimination: gerrymandering.
The harms of Texas’s voter suppression law / November 2023
For over a decade, Rick Ertel, a retired lawyer in rural Texas, has served as an election worker. In 2022, he checked photo IDs, verified voter registrations, and handed voters ballots at Kerr County’s Precinct 440 as an election clerk. Only that year, something had changed in Texas. In the aftermath of former President Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election, the state enacted Senate Bill 1, a wide-ranging voter suppression law that established burdensome restrictions and penalties for voters, election workers, and volunteers.
The first four / February 2021
Before the not-so-subtle trips to the first voting states or the string of announcements from 2024 presidential hopefuls, a drawn-out clash is dividing the four early states down the middle. In Nevada, Democratic Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson introduced a bill last week to position the state at the front of the line. The maneuver could erode the decade-long détente between the privileged four, which wield outsize influence over the nominating contests, with Nevada and South Carolina angling for the top two positions occupied for nearly half a century by Iowa and New Hampshire.
A road to defeat / November 2020
Unlike four years ago, when Trump ascended to the presidency after a string of unexpected victories across the upper Midwest, Biden stitched together a winning coalition that withstood Trump’s loyal army of supporters.
A conservative court downplayed on the campaign trail / October 2020
The nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court marks a chance for the GOP to secure a decisive 6-3 conservative majority and accomplish long-held priorities for years to come. … On the campaign trail, rather than touting that prospect, several prominent Republican senators up for reelection are downplaying a possible conservative shift on the court in an attempt to avoid a potential backlash on Election Day.
A shifting voting bloc / June 2020
In 2016, Trump tilted the election in his favor after narrowly winning a handful of battleground states, and partly by performing well among white women — and older voters — even against the first-ever female nominee. Four years ago, although Hillary Clinton won women overall by a 13-point margin, Trump only lost women over 45 by 3 points (47%-50%), and won over both white women and voters over 45 with 52%, according to national exit poll data.
But this cycle, Trump is not only trailing Biden nationally by 10 points among registered voters in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released earlier this week, he’s also seeing waning support among women over 45.
‘Chill out’: a message to anxious Democrats / November 2019
Former President Barack Obama is no longer sitting on the sidelines of the 2020 Democratic primary, wading into the political sphere with both a warning against “purity tests” and a reassurance to quell anxieties about the size of the field in front of a room of wealthy Democratic donors. “We are going to need everybody. We will not win just by increasing the turnout of the people who already agree with us completely on everything,” Obama told a crowd packed inside a rustic living room in the California hills of rising Democratic megadonor Karla Jurvetson, who gave more than $12 million during the 2018 election cycle.
Curbing voting rights for Floridians with past convictions / March 2019
Republican lawmakers in Florida are looking to narrow the scope of a sweeping ballot measure that restored the right to vote for people with felony convictions, a move that could potentially impact the state’s political climate. The effort sets up a political fight over the broader issue of felon voting rights — a showdown in a significant swing state that voted for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump for president.
History starting in the Mississippi Delta / October 2018
Deep in the Mississippi Delta lies the birthplace of the blues, a colorful and intimate region that exudes the music’s rough, soulful charm that launched the careers of Ike Turner, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters — and now could help elect a native son to the U.S. Senate. Control of the Senate could hinge on a special election in Mississippi to replace retired U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, who resigned due to health issues earlier this year.
An eye on turning Texas blue / July 2018
A Democratic dream for nearly a quarter century has been the prospect of turning Texas blue, but in reality, no Democrat has been elected to statewide office since 1994 or held a Senate seat since 1993 when Lloyd Bentsen left to become Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. That history, and the difficulty of replicating Bentsen’s victories, is not lost on Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso congressman who is mounting an aggressive campaign and raising a staggering amount of money in a bid to unseat outspoken conservative Sen. Ted Cruz.
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