State Elections

About ten years ago David Poole started vpap.org his passion was Virginia politics.  Today it is the leading online site in the US for information on a state legislature.  If your state doesn't have anything like it, you might want to consider using it.  For example, it lists every candidate for the house and state senate since 1997 and tells you where the money was raised and you can then see who else the person or group gave to in an election.  Furthermore there are maps of each district and there is even a redistricting section so you can see if a district became more or less Democratic or Republican.  It even has local races and, for example, here is my county - Fairfax.  One thing we do is to compare incumbents and challengers to see where each is raising money.  Also we look at targeted races to see how the state parties gives so much to those races.  In short it can help any teacher nationwide who is teaching about elections at the state and local level.   Above is a video explaining which senate races were targeted and why and the role of partisan gerrymandering.