I wanted to tell you about a new election news site which is actually a very old one. You’re likely familiar with Daily Kos Elections. If you’re not, it’s long been a section of the Daily Kos website which specializes in downballot races. In other words, all the races besides presidential races. They don’t totally ignore presidential contests, of course. But their bread and butter is everything else. That means congressional races, especially ones operating below the radar. They’re even more priceless on everything below the level of federal elections: state legislatives contests, state secretaries of state, state Supreme Court elections, district attorneys, etc. As we’ve learned over the last decade, those offices are the true taproots and ballast of political power in the United States. Presidents are the great lumbering apex predator of the political ecosystem who exist and survive only because of all the lesser known parts of that ecosystem.
Over a couple decades, DKE became an irreplaceable source of information for all the nitty-gritty of electoral life in American politics. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the quality of their work is that their following was bipartisan. If the information is solid and you can’t find it anywhere else, everyone wants to have it, regardless of who they want to win the election. This has always been my standard in the world of independent and engaged media: have your reporting be good enough, clear enough and sufficiently free of cant that it becomes a must-read even for those who don’t share your political viewpoint. That’s their calling card. They’re really that good. It’s an ironic day to make this recommendation since we begin today the quadrennial four-day festival of worship in the cult of presidenting. But I’m telling you this because DKE is now hiving off from Daily Kos and relaunching as a independent website called TheDownballot. They actually launched at the end of last week. I can’t recommend their work strongly enough. It’s where you go to get the details, to find out which races are really going to matter, and to find leads on where change is happening, where you go to see the cacophony of data kicked up by political life corralled into usable datasets. It’s also the kind of work worth supporting with your dollars, sort of like the coral reefs of nitty gritty political knowledge, if you will.
So that’s my pitch. Needless to say, I’m not involved financially or otherwise with TheDownballot. My only relationship is as a consumer of their work over many years. Check them out.
