Let's say you want to find information on the current congressional race in the 5th Congressional District in Washington State (Spokane area).
Let's say you want to learn about congressional races in the 5th Congressional District over the past couple of decades.
Not surprisingly, if you were interested in a state legislative race, you would try something like:
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:
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.
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 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.