Let me tell you 
about a new project we’re working on and will have up online sometime next month.
If you were reading TPM a year or more ago, you know that we did very granular and detailed tracking of where key members of Congress were on the Social Security issue. Most political news outlets were focused on that debate in late 2004 and early 2005. But we focused on a slice of the debate that we had unique access to because of our readers in different districts. We heard what the members were sending in constituent emails; we got reports from town meetings; details that were showing up in the local press, and more.
We’re going to employ that model to follow this year’s mid-term elections. We’ll be picking thirty to forty House and Senate races. Mainly, we’ll choose the ones that seem genuinely in play, though we’ll also probably feature a few that are just inherently interesting, even if the eventual outcome appears fairly clear.
We’re setting up a special tabbed blog at TPMCafe, which will run live right through the November election. And there we’ll provide wall-to-wall coverage of every race we’re tracking — every poll, every detail about fundraising, who’s getting paid what, what’s getting said at town meetings, who’s running away from their old positions, bamboozling the press and so on. Everything you, the political junkie, need to keep your finger on the pulse of all these races.
The site will be run by our in-house staff and our crop of summer interns. But mainly we’ll need you — folks in the districts, reading the papers, attending the meetings, letting us know about mailings, telling us what you hear. A lot of it we’ll do like I did the Social Security stuff, getting your emails, passing on key details to readers. But we’ll also be posting reader reports as well.
Are you watching a race you think we should follow? Let us know. Are you in a district or state with a closely-watched race and interested in sending regular reports? Let us know that too.
Like each of our projects, it’s an experiment. We’re excited about this one. Stay tuned.
