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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:
We revealed how
Ziklag,
a secret organization of
wealthy Christians including the families behind
Hobby Lobby and Uline,