Stories From The States

In November’s midterm elections, Democrats could win a majority of governor’s offices for the first time in 16 years.

President Donald Trump’s influence towers over some tight races. In Wisconsin, the GOP nominee, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In Georgia, Rick Jackson has said he wanted to be “Trump’s favorite governor.” Both Tiffany and Jackson have since tried to distance themselves from the president. 

Democratic candidates are taking advantage of Republican tension, and hope to see a “blue wave.” Party leaders in some states, like Michigan, are hoping to cap...

The federal Roadless Area Conservation Rule has been in place since 2001, but is under threat. In August, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her agency’s plans to rescind the rule “in its entirety.”

The roadless rule currently prohibits road construction, logging and mining on about 30% of the nearly 200 million acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The rule mostly applies to forested areas of the West, but a unique area in the White Mountains along the border of Maine and New Hampshire could have its landscape changed.

In Episode 50, Maine Mornin...

All Utah voters have automatically received a mail ballot since 2020. The reliably red state had championed universal mail voting. However, with voting under greater national scrutiny, Utah legislators rolled back universal mail voting.

Although he’s recently urged voters to cast their ballots by mail, President Donald Trump has long attacked mail voting, claiming without evidence that it is a source of election fraud.

Utah Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top election official, has recently spoken out about concerns over the Trump administration’s ‘gamesmanship’ with voting, saying it keeps her up at night...

Despite a hard push by Republicans to bolster their chances of retaining control in Washington by redrawing congressional districts to the party’s advantage, Democrats are in a good position to gain several seats in the U.S. House in November. 

And which party controls the U.S. Senate after January is now a true toss-up, according to The Cook Political Report. 

Historically, the party that's out of power picks up seats in the midterm cycle. 

In Episode 48, you’ll hear from Erin Covey, who leads The Cook Political Report's coverage of the U.S. Ho...

Anxiety over artificial intelligence is growing. Will it replace humans and take jobs? How will it change our privacy? Will it impact our elections? The list of existential questions about AI goes on. 

The technology has not been regulated on a national level. Congress has struggled to pass federal legislation, while the Trump administration has pushed to limit state oversight efforts.

One expert says states have stepped up to the plate to create commonsense guardrails on AI. 

In Episode 47, you’ll hear from Maddy Dwyer, a policy analyst on the Center for Democracy & Tech...

Attorney Alexa Sendukas represents many unaccompanied children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and tries to reunite them with relatives in the U.S. She has started to see a startling tactic: Federal agencies are using the children to trap and detain the adults who come to detention centers to pick the kids up. It’s left many families scrambling and trying to figure out when they’ll see each other again.

In Episode 46, you’ll hear from Alexa Sendukas, a managing attorney with the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project. She has represented many detained adults and children in the...

When United Flight 93 crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11, 2001, Tim Lambert was on his way to work at a public radio station. In the newsroom, he saw the televised images of the wreckage in a field near Shanksville and thought the trees looked familiar. Later that night, his dad left a message on his answering machine saying, “Those trees are ours.”

Lambert and his family, by chance, became a part of the story of Flight 93.

In Episode 45, you’ll hear from Pennsylvania Capital-Star Editor-in-Chief Tim Lambert. For 25 years, he has reported on Flight 93, kept in con...

In Colorado, officials in the city of Boulder and Boulder County have filed a lawsuit against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil. They are seeking monetary damages for costs incurred responding to wildfires, repairing transportation infrastructure, restoring watersheds and other devastation caused by climate change. 

The officials are not seeking to regulate emissions or fossil fuel production, but they want the companies to help pay for harms Boulder contends were caused by their industry.

Some counties, however, have filed court records in support of Suncor and Exxon Mobil at taxpayers’ expense. When Deirdre Macnab learned hers was...

Since his loss in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump has continued to deny the official results and baselessly sow doubt about election integrity. With an executive order to restrict mail-in voting and lawsuits demanding states turn over their voter rolls, Trump and his administration have been pushing for more federal involvement in how elections are run. That has some state leaders preparing for worst-case scenarios. 

In Episode 43 of Stories From The States, you’ll hear from Stateline staff writer Kevin Hardy. He spoke to some state attorneys general about how they’re preparing for the possibility of feder...

In states such as Colorado and New Jersey, record-high temperatures have led to a spike in heat-related illnesses. In agricultural states like North Dakota and Wyoming, farmers are struggling to grow crops amid withering drought. 

Throughout the U.S., extreme heat days are becoming more frequent and more intense. State policymakers are now attempting to plan for extreme heat’s growing risks, which could strain public health and infrastructure budgets and the agricultural economies.

In Episode 42, you’ll hear from Andrea Snyder, an associate manager at The Pew Charitable Trusts. She’s been researching how the hot...

Earlier this year, the Trump administration terminated temporary protective status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants. Many communities are preparing for a possible surge of federal immigration enforcement. 

However, Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are being targeted and forced to wear ankle monitors, according to local advocates. The community became a focus of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to conduct mass deportations when he falsely accused Haitians there of eating house pets. He vowed to terminate their legal protections in order to deport them.

In Episode 41, you’ll hear from Ohio Capital Journal reporter Megan Henry...

As community pushback against data center construction grows, new commercials are cropping up in an attempt to improve public opinion. If you live in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas or Virginia, you might have seen the 30-second ads on social media or TV. 

The ads are running in states where a growing number of local governments are considering and passing policies meant to slow data center growth. For example, a group called Oregon Connects registered as a nonprofit business in the state. This came just days before the state legislature passed a one-year pause on a...

Nearly 57,000 students applied for Arkansas’ universal school voucher program, where any student in the state is eligible and can use that state funding towards private school. 

However, there’s a gap between how much students are receiving and what private schools are charging. A study by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice showed private school tuition increased in states with universal voucher programs. 

A report from the Arkansas Advocate found that the state followed that trend, where the average private school tuition among applicants is about $2,600 more than state funding. Some critic...

Across the country, joint ventures between private equity firms and healthcare nonprofits are growing increasingly popular. However many critics say investors and nonprofit care providers can be partners with fundamentally different missions.

As these joint ventures grow, they will test a wave of recent state laws that were designed to increase oversight of private equity in healthcare. 

In Episode 38, you’ll hear from Anna Claire Vollers, a reporter at Stateline. She’s been covering how private equity is changing hospital operations to make a profit for shareholders at the expense of the patient. 

You’ll...

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump a year ago, imposed stricter work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

With some exceptions, recipients must do at least 80 hours per month of work, training or volunteering. The law also increased the upper age limit for work requirements from 54 to 64. 

About 2.5 million Americans lost food benefits in the six-month period following the Republican-passed law.

In West Virginia, the Department of Human Services said late last year the expanded work requirements would affect 36,000 residents.

Among them is 62...

Indiana election officials have canceled or rejected the voter registrations for hundreds of immigrant Hoosiers under a recent proof of citizenship law. One analysis found 981 existing voters had registrations canceled, and another 644 prospective voters have been rejected — or about 62% of the 2,602 people processed.

Charrie Stambaugh was one of those people. Stambaugh has been a U.S. citizen for nearly three decades and has cast a ballot in every election since she became eligible to vote. 

In Episode 36, you’ll hear from Stambaugh about the frustrating re-registration process and the importance of election integrity to  Indiana voters...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement coming into Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania seems familiar to some people there – and not in a good way.

Many residents had no idea a detention center could be built there until reading about it in a news article. They felt blindsided by their local politicians. Now community members worry their area will get taken advantage of again. 

In Episode 35, we explore the risks the project in Schuylkill County pose to an area that’s already struggling to mitigate harms from unwanted industries past and present. 

Because of the ab...

Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, has only one stop light, but the 300-person community is now at the center of the national immigration debate. 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is planning to convert an old warehouse in the area into a 7,500-person detention facility. Many of Tremont’s most vocal residents are wary about whether their township can support the ICE facility. 

Some see the planned detention center as a workforce opportunity, while others fear it will only exacerbate the community’s economic and environmental problems.

In Episode 34, we’re handing...

For months, The New Hampshire Bulletin investigated case after case of abuse and neglect in the state’s intellectual and developmental disability care system, which relies on private agencies to provide care to individuals. 

What they found exposed systemic failures in oversight and harm prevention, publicly reporting families’ stories of loss and trauma for the first time. 

In Episode 33, you’ll hear from reporter William Skipworth from The New Hampshire Bulletin. 

Skipworth won the prestigious 2026 Livingston Award for local reporting for the three-part series, A System of Harm.

Previously, as a reporter...

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana versus Callais decision gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, more than a dozen states moved to redraw their congressional district maps. Ten succeeded in quickly pushing through new lines.

Louisiana’s state legislature passed a new map that redrew the majority-Black district seat currently held by Democratic Representative Cleo Fields of Baton Rouge. His voters were at the center of the Callais decision. 

Even though his district was redrawn in an effort to bolster Republican ranks in Congress, Fields remains optimistic. 

In Episode 32, Fields discus...

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in January challenging trans athlete bans in Idaho and West Virginia. A decision is expected early this summer.

In 2020, Idaho became the first state in the nation to implement this kind of ban, which prohibits transgender athletes in girl’s and women’s sports.

In recent years, state lawmakers passed a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ bills. The measures have included a bill requiring forced outing of youth and a bathroom ban that criminalizes transgender people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, including in private businesses.

Ma...

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security spent more than one billion dollars buying nearly a dozen warehouses in several states. The plan is to convert them into immigrant detention centers as part of the Trump administration's mass deportation initiative.  

Two are being pursued in rural Pennsylvania: Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, and Upper Bern Township in Berks County. As it stands, infrastructure in the area cannot support an operation of that scale. That reality has essentially opened the door for the state government to stall the project. 

In Episode 30, we’re hand...

This year, nearly every state has introduced some form of AI regulation legislation. That’s according to a database from the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan public officials’ association.

Over in Michigan, the state is starting to use AI to process SNAP applications, and it’s sparking some concerns.

And in Pennsylvania, counseling experts are pushing for AI legislation in healthcare. This comes after some people have died by suicide after seeking out AI chatbots for assistance with their mental health. 

In Episode 29, you’ll hear from Michigan Advance reporter Kyle Davidson...

It’s still uncertain if an abortion medication can be prescribed over telehealth. Mifepristone is one of two drugs used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks and to treat miscarriages, but could require an in-person visit before it’s dispensed, depending on a U.S. Supreme Court decision. 

In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a rule that allowed mifepristone to be dispensed through telehealth appointments. However, the state of Louisiana says the policy undermines their state law banning abortion and sued the FDA.

On May 1, the 5th Ci...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais altered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

The decision could upend American politics and hold sweeping consequences for how states and local governments draw district lines at all levels of government, from Congress to school boards.

What does that mean for this year’s midterms, as well as future elections?

In Episode 27, you’ll hear from Jonathan Shorman, democracy reporter for States Newsroom’s D.C. Bureau. From lawmakers scrambling now to redraw congressi...

The U.S. Forest Service is reorganizing. The federal agency will move their headquarters from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City, closing over 50 research stations in 31 states, and will restructure management to rely on states more. 

All these changes are coming while state GOP leaders and the Trump administration are pushing for the sale or transfer of federal public lands.

Montana voters of all backgrounds are loudly against this idea.

In Episode 26, you’ll hear from Stateline reporter Alex Brown, who has been cov...

In Louisiana, the starting pay of a plumber is pretty decent. But that’s only after an aspiring worker spends thousands of dollars for on-the-job training to get a plumber’s license. 

One state lawmaker in Louisiana wants to fast-track this process and reorganize the state’s plumbing board. However, some tradespeople don’t think it’s a good idea.

In Episode 25, we’re handing the reins to our States Newsroom colleagues at the Louisiana Illuminator. 

On their podcast, “The Light Switch,” Editor Greg LaRose and reporte...

For years, Idaho lawmakers have set their sights on Medicaid. In their most recent session, they considered Gov. Brad Little’s call for $22 million in budget cuts and a bill to repeal voter-approved Medicaid expansion.

Last year, the legislature slashed funding for a mobile treatment program for people with severe mental illness. The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association warned the changes risked public safety.

In less than three months, four patients died, sparking outrage from providers and some lawmakers.

The deaths hovered over the debate about Medi...

President Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by aggressive attacks on the press that have led to restrictions in access, the search of a reporter’s home, heated public exchanges and even arrests.

Journalist Estefany Rodríguez was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 4, 2026 in Tennessee. The Nashville Noticias reporter was held in ICE custody for 15 days.  

Since her release, Rodríguez and her lawyers have asserted in court that the federal government violated her rights under the First and Fifth Amendments. They cl...

West Virginia lawmakers fought until the wee hours of the morning – and the final minutes of this year’s session March 14 over Raylee’s Law. Named for 8-year-old Raylee Browning, the bill would have prevented a parent from pulling a child out of public school to homeschool if social services is investigating abuse or neglect in the home.

One of the highest profile bills of the session, the measure boasted bipartisan support. But it faced fierce opposition from homeschool lobbyists, parents and some Republicans, calling it an attack on parental rights.

I...

At least 37 states offer some sort of financial incentives to businesses building data centers. The incentives aren’t just a drop in the bucket either. In Virginia, for instance, the state has notched up about $1.6 billion in data center tax breaks. 

Public opposition is on the rise, however, and some states such as Virginia and Ohio are reconsidering whether to keep offering the financial breaks. 

Stateline’s Madyson Fitzgerald breaks down the change in tune.

In Episode 21, you’ll also meet Max Moran, a sixth-ge...

States legislators have advanced a record number of bills attacking LGBTQ rights over the past few years. Many bills include, but aren’t limited to, restrictions on access to health care, forced outings in schools or barriers to accurate IDs.

In February, the Kansas legislature passed a new law that invalidated driver’s licenses and criminalizes bathroom use for transgender residents. Trans people in Kansas are worried about living in the state. 

In Episode 20, we’ll hear from Kansas Reflector editor-in-chief, Sherman Smith. He and his team have been coverin...

Executions in the United States have been on the decline over the past few decades, yet 27 states still enforce the death penalty – and many are imposing it more often. 

One very recent case in Alabama illustrates the complicated and emotional debates unfolding around the death penalty. 

In 2025, Alabama executed five people, and the state was set for its first execution of 2026 this month. Charles “Sonny” Burton, 75, had been convicted of felony capital murder in 1992, even though he didn’t pull the trigger, and was scheduled to die March 12. 

However, Burton’s fate quickly changed this...

Since the 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, state governments decide how they’ll regulate abortion. This includes which organizations receive reproductive health funding. 

Crisis pregnancy centers, religiously affiliated organizations that advertise free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds but dissuade women from pursuing abortions, are seeing an influx of taxpayer dollars. At the same time, officials are pulling funding from Planned Parenthood and other health clinics across the country.

States Newsroom conducted a 50-state investigation examining state and federal budgets, as well as the tax records of hundreds of...

For years, voucher and scholarship programs that used taxpayer dollars for private school tuition were limited to low-income or special needs students. 

Now, states like Arizona, Iowa and Texas have universal programs that allow any student to use public money for private school tuition. By the 2026-2027 school year, at least 17 states are expected to have that policy. 

There’s been a significant shift in the conversation about school choice in state legislation. Advocates say it gives parents options. Critics argue there’s not enough oversight over public dollars that billionaires are lobbying for.

In E...

Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, elections have been a priority for his administration. 

The FBI raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing 2020 ballots. The Department of Justice demanding voter registration lists and other information from all states. Mail-in ballots at risk of not being postmarked. Trump’s threat of a federal takeover of state elections.

Trump has continued to push false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The DOJ sued 21 states plus the District of Columbia in an attempt to gain access to state...

President Donald Trump is still pushing Republican-led states to redistrict their congressional maps to help the GOP maintain control of the House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.

It led to an unusual burst of mid-decade redistricting in some states, such as Texas and North Carolina that have passed new maps increasing a GOP advantage.

Democratic-led states California and Virginia are pushing for redraws of their congressional maps to counter them.

Meanwhile, Maryland state legislators are at an impasse on whether to change their maps, after a House-approved redistricting plan got stalled in...

For years, private prison companies have been a key partner to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the government carried out its immigration agenda. In 2025, they’ve been rapidly expanding, though they’re also facing pushback in several states. 

CoreCivic is one of the biggest private prison companies in the United States, whose pockets have gotten substantially deeper after President Donald Trump was reelected into office. 

With larger projected revenue, CoreCivic is expanding its operations. 

One place they’ve been eyeing is in Leavenworth, Kansas, where they’d like to reopen the Leavenworth...

For decades, government funding was withheld from historically Black public colleges and universities, such as Tennessee State University. 

States across the South have grappled with the question: What could be possible if those debts were repaid?

In Episode 13, we’ll hear from our colleagues at the Tennessee Lookout and WPLN News. 

Together, they produced The Debt, a reported project and podcast that traces Tennessee State University’s decades-long fight for fair funding. 

You’ll hear from journalists Emily Siner and Camellia Burris, whose reporting examined an overlooked Civil Rights lawsuit, a historic...

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs have faced constant attacks from the current Trump administration. 

Early in his second term, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders to terminate federal programs with any mention of DEI. This included the end of funding to some National Institutes of Health programs. 

Some states pushed back, and now the Trump administration has agreed to drop anti-DEI criteria for stalled health research grants.

However, for one former Georgia professor, his state didn’t participate in this legal battle.

In Episode 12, you’ll meet Géza Kogler. He most...