I love local politics.
I love local politics so much it’s bordering on masochistic, which is a thought that pops into my head every time I’m watching a city council committee meeting on my lunch break, every time I’ve hit the hour three mark of live-posting a marathon Spokane City Council meeting, every time I’m neck-deep in a spreadsheet and my eyes start swimming from analyzing candidate financial data.
But as much as I care about what happens at City Hall, every time election season rolls around, low voter turnout numbers remind me that not everyone feels the same way. And why would they? The community doesn’t get paid to come to meetings or to pore through thousand page agendas or to stay up-to-date on candidates’ positions and policy ideas. It often even feels like municipal governments are instead actively trying to dissuade participation and engagement, like when county commissioners schedule meetings in the middle of weekdays, or the Spokane City Council moves agenda items up for a vote last minute without informing the public.
Since I started at RANGE, it’s been a focus of my job to bring politics to the people, to make complex local issues more accessible and to make it easier for working class constituents to know what’s going on and how we can all fight to make our city better. Keeping my community informed and empowered is always on my mind. So when the whole team huddled up in our small downtown office last winter to discuss our dreams for 2025, my big goal was twofold: more comprehensive election coverage paired with RANGE-style events that bring the politics to the people.
And so, our most ambitious election season was born. This year, we’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished that we’re going to be bragging about it over the next few weeks, but here’s the highlight reel:
- We created the hottest (and coolest) candidate forum of the year with Spokane’s Spiciest Candidate Forum — a sold-out event featuring 5 of the 6 city council candidates eating increasingly spicy wings while being asked increasingly spicy questions.
- I worked with local journalists to host a second candidate forum at the Spokane Public Library with all six candidates that broadcasted live on radio and online.
- We covered every single Spokane City Council race, the statewide constitution change, the municipal judge races and the Spokane ballot measures.
- We broke one of the season’s biggest stories about a candidate’s murky eligibility for office.
- I was a reporter panelist on two of KSPS’s Spokane City Council race debates, asking candidates tough questions on TV.
- We hosted our second annual Politicrawl, which took about 80 Spokanites to bars in every city council district (using the public bus system) to meet with local electeds, candidates, journalists and other civically curious people!
- We leveraged our digital platform to level up our coverage and inform the public, creating a website banner reminding anyone on our election stories to vote by ballot box due to Post Office delays and utilizing mapping and interactive chart tech to show complex campaign finance data.
In the future, we hope to expand our coverage to more races in Spokane County, like the Spokane Valley and Liberty Lake council seats and school boards in the region. The only way we get from here to there, though, is by expanding our staff capacity! You can help us afford to do that by supporting RANGE Media here.
All the best,
Erin
