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ProPublica’s Coverage of the Election Issues That Matter to Voters
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With just days to go before Election Day, political coverage is everywhere. At ProPublica, we avoid horse race reporting and focus on telling stories about deeper issues and trends affecting the country.
Here are some stories from the last year about issues that are important to voters.
Abortion Candace Fails visits the grave of her 18-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Crain, who_ _died after trying to get care for pregnancy complications in three visits to Texas emergency rooms. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1970s-era ruling that guaranteed access to abortion throughout the country, states quickly enacted a patchwork of laws restricting the procedure. In all, 13 states now have a total ban on abortion.
ProPublica has thoroughly examined the impact of those laws over the last two years. Doctors have told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential for legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients who have complications.
In Tennessee, we followed one mother, Mayron Hollis, for a year after she was denied an abortion because of the state’s newly enacted ban. She had become addicted to drugs at 12, and the state had already taken away several of her children. Doctors were concerned that this latest pregnancy, which had implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, could kill her. The story and visual narrative follows Hollis’ struggles to get care following the birth of her daughter.
In Georgia, Amber Thurman took abortion medication to end a pregnancy but died of an infection after her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue, a rare complication that the suburban Atlanta hospital she went to was readily equipped to treat. But earlier that summer, the state had made abortion a felony, and with Thurman’s infection spreading, doctors waited nearly 20 hours before operating. When they finally did, it was too late. Thurman was the mother of a 6-year-old son. U.S. senators are examining whether the hospital broke federal law by failing to intervene sooner, and an official state committee concluded that her death was preventable. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
Most abortions in the U.S. take place in the early weeks of pregnancy, and roughly 63% are done using medication. We recently examined how abortion pills work and answered common questions about them.
In Texas, Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “Our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.
In a second Texas case, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who was six months pregnant, visited two emergency rooms a total of three times after experiencing abdominal cramps and other troubling symptoms. The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without evaluating her pregnancy. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. On Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before offering a procedure called a dilation and curettage to remove the fetus. Hours later, Crain was dead. Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.
As the number of migrant encounters at the U.S. border has surged under the Biden administration, immigration has become a top issue for voters. ProPublica has recently explored how this increase differs in key ways from past surges. In recent years, more of the people crossing the border have been turning themselves in and claiming asylum rather than trying to avoid arrest.
- The U.S. faces a shortage of skilled workers, and immigrants have helped fill that gap. Even areas critical to national security, such as Navy shipbuilding, are struggling to find enough qualified workers. So undocumented workers have stepped in as contractors, but that means they get fewer protections if something goes wrong on the job.
- Cities and towns far from the southern border are facing new challenges with the arrival of significant numbers of immigrants. In the small town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, several hundred immigrants from Nicaragua have arrived — mostly looking for low-paying jobs in factories and farms. Police say the biggest challenge has been strained resources and immigrants driving without licenses — not a wave of crime, as falsely claimed by former President Donald Trump.
- For decades, lobbyists from the business community shaped immigration legislation and moderated the contours of the debate. But in the Trump era, businesses see far more risk in advocating for these policies, a change that’s made it even harder to get to consensus on immigration reforms, even as businesses in a variety of sectors say they need more immigrant workers.
The condition of the U.S. economy is the top concern for voters, according to multiple polls. Across the world, inflation — the rate at which prices increase — surged beginning in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, brought on by supply chain disruptions, surges in demand for goods and services, and the war in Ukraine.
Last year, ProPublica looked at inflation through the lens of the humble automobile tire, tracing the raw materials from a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia to a repair shop in Mississippi to try to answer the question: Why are prices so high?
For a time in 2022, a cadre of ocean carriers were charging exorbitant, potentially illegal, fees on shipping containers stuck because of congestion at ports, another reason the price of goods rose so quickly. That congestion has now eased considerably.
Surveys also suggest housing costs are a primary concern to many Americans. While most economists agree that the lack of housing supply and a decade of low interest rates have fueled increases in housing prices and rents, there may be another factor at work: the use of algorithms to determine the price of your rent through the company RealPage.
Democrats, including Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, face tough reelection fights in states that have shifted swiftly toward Trump, despite investments from the Biden administration in reviving manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts. National Democrats often overlook how important the place you live can be: Even if your own finances are secure, if you look out your window and see your city or town struggling, you believe you are, too. Some academics have referred to this as a sense of “shared fate,” and it could be a powerful force in this election, especially in small cities in the industrial Midwest.
Fourteen years after the Affordable Care Act passed, more Americans have health care coverage, but the system itself remains as broken and fractured as ever. ProPublica has investigated various players in the health care system, from doctors accused of wrongdoing to insurers refusing to cover lifesaving treatments. We’ve also extensively explored mental health treatment this year and how, despite rising needs, America’s health care infrastructure can’t provide meaningful support.
When companies such as Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients. EviCore counters that it develops its guidelines for approvals with the input of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional societies, and that they are routinely updated to stay current with the latest evidence-backed practices. It said its decisions are based solely on the guidelines and are not interpreted differently for different clients.
For Americans searching for mental health providers, many of the lists compiled by insurance companies are misleading or outdated. It’s a “ghost network” that leaves patients frustrated and unable to get timely care.
Health insurer Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. One doctor who used to work for the company, Debby Day, said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. In written responses, Cigna has said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” In 2023, ProPublica revealed how Cigna rejects claims from patients without even reading them. In written responses about this program, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.” Cigna said its review system was created to “accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings,” Cigna wrote. “This allows us to automatically approve claims when they are submitted with correct diagnosis codes.”
Few issues ignite as much passion as educating America’s schoolchildren. School boards and districts are facing battles over school vouchers, book bans and COVID-19 — conflict that is slowly changing how the U.S. educates kids, leaving them on different and unequal paths at school.
Many states led by conservative legislators and governors have pushed a rapid expansion of school voucher programs that promise to allow students and their parents to put state money toward the school — private or public — of their choice.
The model for voucher programs in the country has been Arizona, which now offers vouchers to all students. But the state has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.
A ProPublica analysis shows that low-income families are using the system far less than wealthier families, in part because the location of private schools and the additional costs for transportation, tuition and meals makes using the vouchers more difficult.
School choice advocates are intent on expanding the availability of vouchers to fund private education at the expense of public schools, but they’re facing a surprising pocket of resistance: Some conservative, rural residents are fighting the program, fearing their tax dollars will flow from the only public school in their area to benefit people in cities.
Texas, however, remains one of the biggest holdouts against a school voucher program in which state tax dollars could be used to pay for private schools. Gov. Greg Abbott aggressively campaigned against members of his own party who did not support voucher programs. This fall, Abbott may finally get the votes needed to pass a bill, fulfilling a decadeslong wish of conservative donors in the state.
We told the story of Courtney Gore, a Texas school board candidate who won her seat after claiming on the campaign trail that children were being indoctrinated. She later disavowed her party’s far-right platform after finding no evidence of such efforts.
After COVID-19 school closures ended, absenteeism nearly doubled. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.
The now yearlong war between Israel and Hamas has left tens of thousands dead, and Gaza is facing massive shortages of food, water and medical care. The war has sparked infighting in the Democratic Party and debates within the State Department over how best to manage the situation given the U.S.’s longtime trade and military ties to Israel. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have signaled their desire to end the war soon, though what will get both sides to agree isn’t entirely clear.
The U.S. has long supported Israel with weapons. In January, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew urged Washington to give thousands more bombs to the Israelis because they have a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians, a request that came, at the time, amid the deaths of at least 25,000 Palestinians in the war.
The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding.
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Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Presidency Suggests He Won’t.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.
He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.
Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.
Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.
Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.
ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.
We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.
“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.
Get in TouchNo matter who wins the presidential election, ProPublica is planning to deepen its reporting on poverty issues, from housing to child support to Social Security benefits and Medicaid. We will be covering how the incoming administration handles federal poverty policy, as well as state and local social services agencies and private companies that profit off of the poor. Are you a current or former federal employee with insight into federal poverty programs? Are you someone with stories to pitch us on any of these topics? Reach out directly at Eli.Hager@propublica.org.
Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.
He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.
Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.
If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:
- Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
- Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
- Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
- Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
- Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
- Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
- Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
- Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.
Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.
As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.
President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.
Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”
This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.
Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.
One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.
Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.
And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)
Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.
Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.
Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?
Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.
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The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.
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