Stacker-Government & Politics

By Hayley Harding for Votebeat In the middle of March, Barb Mullaly wasn’t thinking much about elections. She was thinking about how it was allegedly going to be spring any day now, and yet it was still 30 degrees outside in Elk Rapids, her village on the shore of Grand Traverse Bay in Northern Michigan.

By Mariel Padilla for The 19th It was the beginning of her junior year, and 20-year-old Mia Tedesco was setting up a table for the campus open house where more than 200 recognized student organizations were preparing to recruit new students. Tedesco laid out bracelets that read “We are Charlie Kirk” — an homage to

By Ray Suarez for The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Capital and Main An estimated 36 million Latino adults are eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. In the 2024 election, Democrats were shocked to see those voters, especially men, choose Donald Trump by the highest margins Latino voters had given a Republican in decades (Trump

When the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed in July 2025, officials warned some of the cuts within the bill could devastate rural hospitals. Those cuts are set to hit after the midterm election this fall, and some members of Congress are working to offset them. A total of about $1.3 trillion is set to be

Paddlers skim along the water to the sound of gulls. Small waves splash against driftwood and the banks of the Des Moines River. A flotilla of experienced kayakers, canoers who built their own boats and infrequent recreators expands and contracts, making its way downstream. On and off the water, the conversations are the same —

With Election Day just weeks away, housing affordability is a headline issue. But most of the conversation is about getting people into homes. After identifying in several recent studies that homeownership costs are causing enormous stress, Hometap focused its latest research on the other side of the equation: what it costs for people to stay in

Four years after far-right Republicans helped elect Monae Johnson as South Dakota secretary of state, she’s backing a Democrat to replace her. The cross-party endorsement is unusual. But the more interesting story is how Johnson got to this point, Votebeat reports. Johnson ousted a GOP incumbent in 2022 with support from activists who distrusted electronic vote-counting

“It would go right about … there.” Joaquin Peña nods under a straw hat, motioning to a piece of pipe sticking out of his land roughly 100 feet from the banks of the Rio Grande. Leggy sunflowers bob in the wind against a mountainous backdrop that resembles an old Western movie set. Two dogs named

Voters in four states will decide housing-related ballot measures in November, providing testing grounds for different strategies to boost affordable homes.  The six measures across California, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the highest number in a single election year in at least two decades, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan election research organization. As Stateline reports,

As prediction markets have exploded in popularity over the past two years, they have also become increasingly controversial, setting off a lobbying-fueled power struggle for regulation of the platforms.  Amid allegations of insider trading, bets on military operations, and deceptive marketing practices, some states are seeking to sue or ban prediction markets. But the federal government has

In January, as the Trump administration launched an immigration crackdown in Maine, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was intercepted on his way to work. The civil engineer from Colombia told officers he had a visa through his employer, but the immigration agents who arrested him did not seem to care. According to the federal lawsuit he later

After federal immigration agents ended their aggressive enforcement blitzes in the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago, President Donald Trump promised mass deportations with “a little bit of a softer touch.” Less focused on targeted cities, this quieter approach has led to a surge in immigration arrests across the country, The Marshall Project reports. Arrests began

Like many parents, Arielle Roth has concerns about her children’s screen time at school. But unlike her peers, she’s in a position to influence the issue at nearly every school in America. Roth heads an obscure federal agency within the Commerce Department that serves as the president’s top policy adviser on telecommunications issues. In that

When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Pe’ Sla, the sacred prairie in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they set out on back trails. They needed to find out where. That’s when they saw a deer break ahead, and a red-tailed hawk soar above them — less like coincidence

Most homeschoolers now piece together a variety of classes and outings for their kids. In the north Pittsburgh area, that often includes enrolling in Roots Learning Academy. Known as a hybrid program, Roots serves roughly 150 families who split their time between home instruction and on-site academic or extracurricular courses in rented church spaces. But

In mid-August, 2026, the Trump administration filed a proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement (EIS) to rescind the Roadless Rule — a 2001 ruling that protected inventoried roadless areas from further development. The rescinding of the Roadless Rule would open up around 45 million acres of public lands for road construction, logging, mining, and

In April 2025, the Election Truth Alliance was a three-month-old Nevada nonprofit with a growing audience in anti-Trump online spaces and a claim that something about the 2024 presidential election did not add up. The group had released an analysis of the results in Pennsylvania and sent letters to officials there and in Wisconsin asking

  Behind recent news stories about a controversial land swap are plans for a major new gateway resort on the western border of America’s most traffic-stressed national park On August 28, the online site NOTUS broke the news that officials at Yosemite National Park and the U.S. Department of the Interior had been quietly conferring

  According to AdImpact, the 2026 election spending will reach a record high of $11.6 billion. The money shows that political advertisers are chasing the long-running assumption that younger voters live online, while older voters are looking through the mailbox. A new survey, however, shows Gen Z’s attention is elsewhere during campaign season. UPrinting’s 2026