Welcome to Battleground!
The Basics
Battleground is a daily newsletter examining our nation’s electoral geography, focusing primarily on recent election results and local news sources.
All posts are written with a “maps-first” approach. I create my own custom maps to illustrate voting patterns for every state and district in the country.
New posts are released every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for free readers. Paid subscribers receive additional, exclusive newsletters throughout the week.
What is this?
Battleground is a blog and newsletter devoted to surveying America’s electoral geography. Hit the button below and take a deep dive into our political landscape, one state at a time.
Each post leads with a map, typically displaying the results from a recent election. I’ll then dive into the political geography laid out before us, bringing in any pertinent geological, demographic, economic and/or cultural data to help bring context to voting trends. I’ll delineate both Democratic and Republican strongholds and attempt to denote the driving factors of change. I always include a link to the official results, certified by each state’s government, in the header of each email.
All maps featured in this publication are of my own creation and design, unless otherwise specified. Ever since grade school I’ve been a geography nerd and politics has always made the most sense to me within a spatial context. I write with a “maps-first” approach, therefore, all of my pieces will include at least one map (if not several.) Human geography and how we take up space is paramount in electoral politics so if there’s a way to display a concept or trend in a map, you bet I’ll make one for ya.
Every post will end with a summation of the sources cited as well as any other relevant news clips that may provide more insight beyond what I can include in a single newsletter (email size limits ain’t no joke!). In this endeavor, I’m making a personal commitment to favor local news sources over national publications. These sources do a much better job at contextualizing national issues for local audiences. It’s also sometimes worth a meta-analysis of how local sources cover national issues as these platforms have a unique role in shaping local opinions on unfamiliar topics.
Where should I start?
Dive into the archive to see the states I’ve already covered. Every post stands on its own and each week I try to group states via a regional theme: like states in the Black Belt or surrounding the Great Lakes. The weekly recap posts (like the ones linked in the previous sentence) are a great roundup of the various topics and states I’ve already covered.
Please let me know what you’d like to see from this newsletter! Wanna see more coverage of congressional races? Are you excited about the upcoming redistricting process? Do you have a strong appetite for local and/or state-level politics?
Please comment and share your thoughts below, I wanna hear from you!