Union Money in Disguise
Union dues aren’t just funding workplace issues anymore — they’re bankrolling entire political ecosystems. Most of it happens through coalitions and nonprofits workers never hear about.
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Ilhan Omar: Pirate Queen
Minnesota’s Somali-linked fraud crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. A 2% political bloc out-organized a disengaged electorate, administrative oversight collapsed, and Ilhan Omar became the symbolic center of a system that stopped supervising itself.
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Small-Dollar Fronts
Small-dollar fundraising has become a subscription economy that funds politics year-round. What looks like grassroots passion is often a network of recurring donations powering permanent infrastructure.
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Obstructed: The Resistance Presidency (2017–2020)
From the very first hour of the new administration, Washington activated a machinery not designed for governance but for containment. This was the Resistance Presidency: an extended four-year episode in which the elected executive became the interloper, and the previous executive’s networks—inside government, media, intelligence, and NGOs—functioned as the de facto continuity administration.
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Dark Money and Disclosure Loopholes
The disclosure fight isn’t happening at the FEC level — it’s happening inside the IRS, where the definitions of “political activity” quietly determine what the public gets to see.
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Arabella’s Four Funds
A handful of nonprofit funds have learned how to reshape politics by building the infrastructure beneath it. They don’t run campaigns — they manufacture the groups that influence campaigns.
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Behavioral Lock-In
Voters don’t wait for legislatures to tell them how to participate — they adapt first, and the law eventually follows. Once a population internalizes a method of voting, the system reshapes itself around that habit whether policymakers like it or not.
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Training the Clerks
Election rules aren’t being rewritten in legislatures as much as they’re being rewritten in training rooms. A network of “nonpartisan” NGOs has figured out that shaping clerks is more powerful than shaping candidates.
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Mail Ballot Normalization
Mail ballots didn’t become dominant through statutory change—they became dominant through cultural change.
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The Drop-Box Map
Wisconsin’s drop-box rulings didn’t just affect one state — they created a roadmap for nationwide replication. Local authorities are now deploying boxes strategically, using administrative discretion and demographic mapping to reshape turnout patterns.