I’ve told you before about my kind of love/hate feelings about Tom Edsall, longtime reporter for The Washington Post, who more recently writes a weekly column for the New York Times. It’s not too much to say that almost regardless of the facts of the moment he’ll come up with an explanation for why those facts are terrible news for Democrats. Yesterday’s column is a kind of tour de force in this genre (“This Is a Realignment That Has Significant Staying Power.”) The column collects quotes and quick exchanges with a range of political scientists who argue that the first six months of 2025 have shown just how enduring Donald Trump’s 2024 realignment is turning out to be and quickly dismisses the views of the few observers he quotes who disagree.

As someone who tries to comment on and understand current events as best as I’m able, columns like this are kind of a warning sign of a path not to go down, that path being looking for the analyses and data points which back your preferred view of things or the one you feel reflexively must be the case. So I tried my best to not do that while thinking about this piece.

If you’ve been reading TPM for awhile, you may already know that our organization can shift on a dime. We typically have around five reporters. (A few of our editors also write.) That means, unlike larger news organizations, we don’t have people with particular beats. We don’t have people who author a particular kind of story — no one who just writes breaking news or just writes features or just does a newsletter or a podcast. Everyone, at any moment, can pitch in with anything on any topic. 

Though it wasn’t always the result of a conscious decision on the part of the editors, TPM has made use of this flexibility during this unprecedented time. We’ve reinvented our approach to the news repeatedly since August 2024, when our last Journalism Fund drive concluded, with our reporters working in different modes and in different styles across a wide range of topics to contend with a historic moment in American history.

As we reflect on the many ways TPM is unique during the journalism fund drive, I thought readers might enjoy a glimpse of how we see the journey we’ve traveled over the last year — in terms of what we understood ourselves to be providing to readers, and what we understood readers to need from us.