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Newspapers, Current Events, and Elections: Finding Election-related News: Regional and National

Search Strategies for Regional Election News

Let's say you want to find information on the current congressional race in the 5th Congressional District in Washington State (Spokane area).

  1. Choose the right database.  NewsBank in this case.
    1. Don't bother with Proquest Newsstream, Newspaper Source Plus or even Nexis Uni.
  2. Search on both candidates name:
    1. "mcmorris rodgers" AND "dave wilson"
  3. Optional:  Sort by newest first. (Or use the date delimiter in the left hand column to set your own dates but keep the relevance ranking)
  4. What happens if I search on only one candidate's name? 
    1. If you search "mcmorris rodgers", you should be good -- you'll get everything you would have gotten by searching both candidates' names, plus a few articles (mostly letters of support that neglect to mention the opponent) in which "dave wilson" is not mentioned.
    2. If you search "dave wilson" you might get a few irrelevant articles because his name is not as unique. But again, you'll find a few relevant articles that you would have missed by searching on both canddates' names.
    3. This will play out differently in each race, depending on how unique the names of the candidates are.
    4. You can always add other search terms, like "spokane".  That strategy will reduce the number of irrelevant results, but may miss some relevant results as well.

Let's say you want to learn about congressional races in the 5th Congressional District over the past couple of decades.

  1. Stick with NewsBank.
  2. Search on "5th congressional district"
  3. On the search results screen, limit by Location:  Washington State (Limits are in the column on the left-hand side).
    1. In NewsBank, you get results from the Spokane Spokesman Review and also several other Washington State papers, including the Seattle Times and the Olympian
    2. Here is an image of a search that retrieved articles from many different states, and below, that, what it looks like to limit results to Washington State newspapers:
       

   

Not surprisingly, if you were interested in a state legislative race, you would try something like:

  1. "22nd legislative district" for broader and more historical background
  2. Or use the candidates' names:
    1. "jessica bateman" AND "dusty pierpoint"
  3. Both names are fairly unique, so, with the Washington State filter on, you might want to search each name individually to find all relevant articles.

Not surprisingly (again), if you were interested in the statewide referendum on sex ed, you would want to search on "referendum 90".   But, this would not be a strong search, since the term "r-90" is frequently used.  So your search should be:

  1. "referendum 90" OR "r-90"
     

Reminder:  NewsBank is by far the best of our 4 news databases for Washington State newspapers.  NewsBank covers most or all of the smaller regional newspapers that can be found in the other 3 databases.  This may hold true for other states as well, although we haven't tested.

Quick Links

For national news sources, here are the main national newspapers in each of our 4 databases (Proquest U.S. Newsstream will usually be your best choice for searching the largest collection of current national newspapers at once):

Washington Congressional and Legislative Districts

Washington State (like all states) is divided into "congressional districts" (for election of state representative to the federal House of Representatives) and "legislative districts"(for election of local representatives to the State legislature).  Each legislative district elects one State Senate rep, and two State House reps.

Here's a map of the districts in Washington:  https://app.leg.wa.gov/districtfinder/

Washington is one of four states that determine district boundaries via a bipartisan political appointee commission -- this is thought to have limited gerrymandering in comparison to states where the legislature itself redraws district boundaries.

Daniel J. Evans Library - MS: LIB2300 - 2700 Evergreen Parkway, NE. Olympia, WA 98501 - 360-867-6250