Skip to content
Project 2025
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories
​Paintings of Stalin

The Stalinization of America

A woman timing another women in the military as she does push ups.

Hegseth Made the Fitness Test Harder for Women in Combat Roles. Most Female Marines Are Passing.

U.S. economic crisis as markets crash. Concept showing a slowing market behind a black and white United States Capitol

Our National Debt Won’t Bankrupt Us. It Can Still Paralyze Us.

American Flag, Capitol building and the United States Constitution

Lawyers Must Reaffirm Their Oath to Defend the Constitution

Historical documents representing founding principles of United States on flag backdrop

Why the Constitution Remains Our Defense Against Tyranny

Messaging Advice for the Census Bureau

David Hawkings
By David HawkingsJan 28, 2019
David Hawkings
David Hawkings is a contributor for The Fulcrum, a nonpartisan publication dedicated to strengthening democracy by fostering informed civic engagement and elevating diverse perspectives.
See More Writings by author

With or without a citizenship question, there may be significant resistance to the legal requirement that everyone in the country in April 2020 complete the census. A study by Civis Analytics, a data science software and consultancy, found 21 percent of Americans saying they are "not likely" to answer the census and 35 percent saying they aren't likely to encourage anyone else to do so.

The firm – created by Dan Wagner, the top data guru for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign – also had some marketing advice for the Census Bureau: Framing a public relations campaign around making the census a "civic duty" could improve response rates 8 percent. Reminding people that an accurate census ensures proper allocation of House seats to the states would help response rates about 5 percent, while stressing the head count's role in allocating government dollars would help by 3 percent.


Latest news

data server
Environment

The One Thing Both Sides of the Data Center Fight Already Agree On

​Young adult woman accessing artificial intelligence
Media & Technology

When One Person Can Do the Work of a Team

​Tax Word on Wooden Block With Calculator and Tax Form
Economy

$40 Trillion U.S. National Debt & Role of ATR Taxpayer Protection Pledge Shell Game

Read More

photograph shows a handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps

This photograph shows a handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps, including LLMs, chatbots and generative AI, with logos (from L) of Proton AG's Lumo, Meta AI, Mistral Vibe (formerly Le Chat), xAI's Grok, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Deepseek, OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google's Notebook LLM and generative AI music app Suno, in Saint-Mande, east of Paris, on July 15, 2026.

Photo by Martin LELIEVRE / AFP via Getty Images)

The Second AI Election: Testing the Safeguards Before November

The 2024 U.S. presidential election was supposed to be the “first AI election.” Experts warned that generative AI could flood voters with deepfakes and fabricated evidence of fraud, U.S. intelligence officials declassified intel reports on foreign influence operations already experimenting with the technology, and leading AI companies pledged to combat deceptive election content. But foreign nations faced significant barriers to deploying AI to influence that election, according to the now-shuttered U.S. Foreign Malign Influence Center.

Two years later, the picture looks very different. AI tools have become far more sophisticated and widely available. Russia, China, and Iran are deploying a wide variety of cutting-edge AI tools in more sophisticated ways in foreign influence operations aimed at the United States and its citizens, among others. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has itself used AI in misleading ways, while at the same time dismantling or defunding the federal and independent bodies that identified and countered election-related influence campaigns. With the potential for AI-driven misinformation campaigns to escalate sharply in this year’s midterms, we tested some of the most popular AI models to learn how they can be exploited to peddle false election narratives. The results are clear: AI companies, lawmakers, and civil society must do more to blunt the threat ahead of elections this November and in 2028 to help ensure free and fair elections. We outline the steps they can take to do so below.

Keep ReadingShow less
library
a large library filled with lots of books
Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash

Beyond Campus Walls: Why the Attack on Minority Support Should Worry Every Donor

In President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to bring private universities to heel through policy change in the tax code, the administration is threatening to revoke tax-exempt status from schools that offer targeted support to minority students. This move should have everyone who cares about education, public works, and charitable giving ringing the alarm bell.

U.S. citizens have enjoyed tax incentives to support the good works, charitable causes, or public-serving organizations we care about for more than a century—since the implementation of the Revenue Act of 1913. Beginning in 1969, entities like private schools and colleges, museums, arts centers, and charitable foundations qualified as not-for-profit, donation-eligible organizations through section 501(c)(3) in the U.S. tax code. A not-for-profit designation grants the institution federal tax-free status, meaning it doesn’t pay federal taxes, and allows taxpayers to deduct donations from their federal tax return. Federal tax deductions incentivize individual and corporate donors to open their wallets for charitable giving.

Keep ReadingShow less
classroom
Empty wooden tables and chairs in a library with shelves of books
Photo by Tuyen Vo on Unsplash

What Makes a College Civics Requirement Work

Students entering Ohio’s public universities this fall are the first four-year cohort expected to graduate under the state’s new American civic literacy requirement. Beginning with the spring 2030 graduating class, students must complete an approved three-credit course built around the Constitution and other foundational texts, with limited exemptions for equivalent coursework.

Ohio is not alone. More than a dozen states now have some form of undergraduate civics course requirement, and Iowa has recently enacted a two-course requirement for undergraduates entering four-year programs at its three public universities beginning in 2028. As more states adopt these requirements, faculty and lawmakers need workable models for putting them into practice.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2026