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. Credit: 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 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.

What We’re Watching

During Donald Trump’s second presidency, ProPublica will focus on the areas most in need of scrutiny. Here are some of the issues our reporters will be watching — and how to get in touch with them securely.

Portrait of Eli Hager
Eli Hager

I cover poverty issues, including housing, labor protections, child welfare and safety net programs.

I plan to watch 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.

Portrait of Brett Murphy
Brett Murphy

I’ll cover federal agencies at the center of the Trump administration’s foreign affairs agenda and the corporations that help carry it out.

Reach out if you work at the State Department, the Pentagon or anywhere else with tips about how the U.S. influences other countries — and how they may influence ours.

Portrait of Justin Elliott
Justin Elliott

I’m interested in the relationships between Trump and the country’s richest people, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Do you work for a billionaire who might have business with Trump? Or for one of their companies? Get in touch.

Portrait of Melissa Sanchez
Melissa Sanchez

I report on immigration and labor in the Midwest.

I’d like to talk to people who have information about Trump’s deportation plans — who might be harmed, who might benefit, and what industries and parts of the country might be left untouched.

Learn more about our reporting team. We will continue to share our areas of interest as the news develops.

If you don’t have a specific tip or story in mind, we could still use your help. Sign up to be a member of our federal worker source network to stay in touch.

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  • 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.


Immigration

Delmis Jiménez stands on top of the international bridge that divides Ciudad Juárez and El Paso as her family waits for U.S. customs officers to allow them into the United States. Her husband died in a fire at an immigration detention facility while attempting to reach the U.S. eight months earlier. Credit: Paul Ratje for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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.

  • 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.


Economy

Tire technician Juan Cantu works at Tire Town Auto Service in Picayune, Mississippi, last year. Customers there saw price hikes as the shop dealt with supply chain problems, the rising cost of raw materials and trouble finding workers. Credit: Daniella Zalcman, special to ProPublica

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.

  • 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.


Health Care

Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna cared more about being fast than being right: “Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” Day said. Credit: Andrea Bruce for ProPublica

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.

  • 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.”


Education

Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, considered sending her daughter to a private school using vouchers before deciding her neighborhood school was the better option. Credit: Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica

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.

  • 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.


Foreign Policy

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. Earlier this year, two U.S. government bodies concluded that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Credit: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

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.