Common Cause is a watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., with chapters in 35 states. It was founded in 1970 by John W. Gardner, a Republican, who was the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson as well as chair of the National Urban Coalition, an advocacy group for minorities and the working poor in urban areas. As initially founded, Common Cause was prominently known for its efforts to bring about an end to the Vietnam War and lower the voting age from 21 to 18.
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money—in which she investigated the history of the right-wing billionaire network centered on the Koch brothers—was published to critical acclaim.
Sidney Stone Blumenthal is an American journalist and political operative. A former aide to President Bill Clinton, he is a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton and was formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation. As a journalist, Blumenthal wrote about American politics and foreign policy. He is also the author of a multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. Three books of the planned five-volume series have already been published: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel, and All the Powers of Earth. Subsequent volumes were planned for later.
Alex Pareene is an American journalist, writer, and editor. He was the editor of the online news magazine Gawker.
Robert L. Kuttner is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a 20-year columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe.
Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and as an observer and commentator on environmentalism for The New Yorker magazine. Like The Sixth Extinction, her writing and other books, such as Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Under a White Sky often explore the crisis faced by humans in the Anthropocene.
Elizabeth Drew is an American political journalist and author.
Elizabeth Macklin is an American poet.
The 2012 United States House of Representatives elections were held on November 6, 2012. It coincided with the reelection of President Barack Obama. Elections were held for all 435 seats representing the 50 U.S. states and also for the delegates from the District of Columbia and five major U.S. territories. The winners of this election cycle served in the 113th United States Congress. This was the first congressional election using districts drawn up based on the 2010 United States Census.
John D’Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay." He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame," and "About a Mountain."
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a 2014 non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. The book argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction. In the book, Kolbert chronicles previous mass extinction events, and compares them to the accelerated, widespread extinctions during our present time. She also describes specific species extinguished by humans, as well as the ecologies surrounding prehistoric and near-present extinction events. The author received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the book in 2015.
What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster is a book by the Weekly Standard columnist Jonathan V. Last about declining birthrates in the United States and elsewhere around the world and the implications for demographics and the functioning of society and the economy.
Gerrymandering in the United States has been used to increase the power of a political party. Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. The term "gerrymandering" was coined after a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry noted that one of the districts looked like a salamander.
James Kenji López-Alt, often known simply as Kenji, is an American chef and food writer. His first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, became a critical and commercial success, charting on the New York Times Bestseller list and winning the 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for the best General Cooking cookbook. The cookbook expanded on López-Alt's "The Food Lab" column on the Serious Eats blog. López-Alt is known for using the scientific method in his cooking to improve popular American recipes and to explain the science of cooking.
Thomas Vinciguerra was an American journalist, editor, and author. A founding editor of The Week magazine, he published about popular culture and other subjects in The New York Times, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and GQ.
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) is a non-fiction book written by the American investigative journalist Jane Mayer. The book focuses on a network of extremely wealthy conservative Republicans, foremost among them Charles and David Koch, who have together funded an array of organizations that work in tandem to influence academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and the American presidency for their own benefit. Mayer particularly discusses the Koch family and their political activities, along with Richard Mellon Scaife, John M. Olin, the Bradley brothers, as well as the DeVos and Coors families and their related foundations.
Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton is an investigative biography about United States Senator, and former First Lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton that was written by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. and published on June 8, 2007, by Little, Brown and Company.
Elizabeth A. I. Powell is an American poet and professor. She is the author of three books of poetry, Atomizer, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances and The Republic of Self. She is the author of the novel "Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCREW Catalogues". In addition, Powell is the granddaughter of Donald H. Miller, Jr. a founder of Scientific American and a Director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
REDMAP is a project of the Republican State Leadership Committee of the United States to increase Republican control of congressional seats as well as state legislatures, largely through determination of electoral district boundaries. The project has made effective use of partisan gerrymandering, by relying on previously unavailable mapping software such as Maptitude to improve the precision with which district lines are strategically drawn. The strategy was focused on swing blue states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin where there was a Democratic majority but which they could swing towards Republican with appropriate redistricting. The project was launched in 2010 and estimated to have cost the Republican party around US$30 million.
Thomas Brooks Hofeller was a Republican political strategist primarily known for his involvement in gerrymandering electoral district maps favorable for Republicans. David Daley of The New Yorker referred to Hofeller as "the master of the modern gerrymander." According to The New York Times, Hofeller's "mastery of redistricting strategy helped propel the Republican Party from underdog to the dominant force in state legislatures and the United States House of Representatives."
