Start off your morning right with this story 👀
It's my newsletter and I'll use it for shameless self-promotion if I want to.
Good morning! I’m sneaking into your inbox to highlight a hot-off-the-presses story I’ve been working on for a long time.
My colleague Dhrumil Mehta has been researching South Asian American campaign donations way before the election began. I was brought in to make spiffy graphics, and therefore didn’t spend months hounding the FEC for correct data or writing complex scripts to parse out something meaningful from spreadsheets so long they regularly crashed my computer. Dhrumil did all of that and more—his dedication shows in the myriad interviews, academic papers, and thoughtful writing throughout the piece.
At FiveThirtyEight we are absolutely spoiled by the amount of editing our pieces go through. Sarah Frostenson and Maya Sweedler stayed on top of this story for months, defining scope—and in Maya’s case—confirming my charts didn’t have a single point out of place. We also benefited from the keen eye of Snigdha Sur at The Juggernaut, where this piece is simultaneously published. My charts were edited by Julia Wolfe, who always encourages me to create visualizations that are as clear as they are fun. Emily Scherer combed through the very slim selection of photos and chose beautiful images to bring the article to life.
I’m so grateful I was able to be a part of this piece. One of the frustrations I run up against often in data-driven politics reporting is how often racial categories are split in Black, white, and other—with maybe Asian/Pacific Islander thrown in. It’s hard to write about people who look like me—multiracial, South Asian American, Pakistani American—when data collection skims over our existence. Dhrumil went to extensive lengths to surface, clean, and analyze the campaign finance data the piece talks about but also to contextualize it properly. Asian American aren’t a monolith, and neither are South Asian Americans—I nearly squealed when I saw the Ismaili community mentioned!
Here’s the link again, if you missed it the first few times. As always, I love your feedback on the story and the visuals.
Take care out there,
Jasmine