Articles by Crowdpac

Presidential politics has taken center stage this election year, for good reason. But if you're interested in making a political impact, you may be focusing on the wrong race. The truth is, when you vote for a candidate (or donate to their campaign), you can't be sure you will get what you voted for. Politicians make all sorts of promises during the campaign, but after the election, often for perfectly good reasons, their positions are less clear. This is the nature of indirect democracy. Ball...

After the Bernie Sanders campaign put single-payer healthcare in the national spotlight, it's no surprise that many of his supporters are continuing to carry the torch. An initiative proposing a single-payer healthcare plan, popularly known as ColoradoCare, was placed on the November ballot by a petition signed by over 150,000 people. If voted in, ColoradoCare would create a statewide health system supported by an increase in taxes as well as employer and employee contributions. Pro-reform advo...

Few political battles have waged as intensely as the campaign to raise the minimum wage. Proponents insist raising the wage is critical to lifting working families from poverty while opponents insist that an increase could devastate small businesses. Yet one can sometimes feel detached by the apparent impossibility of having real impact on the debate and moving the issue forward. But it turns out that normal people can in fact have a effect real change. The key is to go local. While the federal...

With the increased likelihood that no Republican candidate will arrive in Cleveland with the 1,237 delegates necessary to secure the nomination outright, the GOP may be forced to turn to crowdsourcing to elect its next standard-bearer. Campaign operatives and party officials are already bracing for a scenario in which the nomination contest is drawn out into multiple rounds of voting - a process that could see new candidates be nominated from the floor after the third or fourth rounds. This ide...

Donald Trump has certainly talked a big game when it comes to foreign policy. After making a series of bold promises to "destroy ISIS," "take jobs back from China," and force Mexico to pay for a wall along the southern U.S. border, campaign spectators have been waiting on the Donald to take the initial step of building a team of advisers capable of delivering on his campaign rhetoric. On Monday, Trump announced the first five members of his foreign policy team, promising more in the coming mont...

As Donald Trump steamrolls his GOP rivals in primary contests across the country, a new civil war is brewing within the GOP between his supporters and those who say simply, #NeverTrump. And as candidates have fallen by the wayside, their supporters have been forced to choose between falling in line behind the Republican frontrunner or throwing their weight behind one of the remaining anti-Trump choices - a field reduced to two candidates in Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich. ...

Not long ago, following serial losses in primary contests across the country, Ohio Governor John Kasich was left for dead in the race for the GOP nomination. But now that Marco Rubio has pulled the plug on his campaign after a devastating loss in Florida to Donald Trump, Kasich has claimed the "establishment lane" for himself with a strong Ohio victory and a clean sweep of its winner-take-all delegates. Regardless, Kasich's path to the nomination, and the Presidency for that matter, has always ...

The Democratic race is heating up, with Clinton leading Sanders by a very small margin. It has divided liberals across the country into Hillary and Bernie camps. But who are the people supporting Clinton and Sanders? Are they neighbors or are they geographically distant? More importantly, are they economically similar, or is there an income gap between them? We took a look at the zip codes where one candidate most out-performs the other in fundraising - the places where one candidate has raised...

Should the government be able to access encrypted data on your smartphone? That's the question surrounding the very public pushback Apple is giving the FBI, which is seeking to recover data in the iPhone of one of the shooters in the recent San Bernardino terror attacks. It turns out that what your elected officials think about this question might have a lot to do with the campaign contributions they receive from technology companies and their employees. After Apple issued a public letter to it...