This month, New Yorkers turned out in droves to vote in a historic election. More than 2 million people voted in the mayoral election – the highest in 50 years. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign succeeded in getting people involved in local New York City politics with hordes of people canvassing and volunteering for the candidate.
Now that the election is over, how can we keep this energy going? My research suggests one potential path forward. During my Ph.D. at Cornell, I studied the alternative ways that people get local information in today’s media environment. It’s no secret that local newspapers are struggling – since 2004, the number of journalists employed at newsrooms has dropped by about half.
So, for the past years, I have asked: If local newspapers are disappearing, where do people turn to instead?
Broadly, I found that people now turn to local online spaces to get crucial information about their communities. Most localities have some version of them. In some places, all the action happens on Nextdoor. In others, there’s one particular Buy & Sell group on Facebook that everybody goes to.
To understand this phenomenon, I started by talking with people about their local information needs, speaking with them about where they get information about civic issues like COVID outbreaks, schools, and local elections. I complemented these interviews with user surveys and data analyses of actual posts people made to Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit.
I struggled to find information on my local elections in New Jersey. So I turned to neighborhood forums to find information about my own mayoral candidates in Jersey City. The local reddit forum boasts 99,000 subscribers, almost one third of the city’s population. A few of the top candidates conducted an AMA on Reddit, where they answered people’s questions directly. Through this reddit forum, I also found a local Substack newsletter, run by a long-time member of the community. Though only one person runs the newsletter, and I don’t think the measly $5 per month donations offset all their efforts, this newsletter consistently provides analysis of local candidate policies and perspectives you can’t find elsewhere. On Youtube, a recording of the Mayoral Forum on Street Safety & Transportation sees the top candidates propose their traffic enforcement policy, with commenters who debate the most salient points.
When I cast my vote at City Hall on Sunday, these were the information stewards I was thanking. The moderators who organized the AMAs and let individuals ask questions, the newsletter writer who I’ve followed for years, and yes, even the YouTube comments that told me which points to pay attention to.
On these local online platforms, we desperately need good stewards of local information. We need these people precisely because these platforms have real problems. These spaces can be politically divided, toxic, and sometimes exclusionary. In my own work, I've found that Reddit's local communities tend to attract older, more educated users, and that Nextdoor posts can reflect troubling socioeconomic patterns.
But I have also witnessed so many examples where individuals made these imperfect spaces better. During the COVID-19 pandemic I talked to a nurse who spent her limited free time correcting misinformation in a local Facebook group chat. In my studies, people who followed historical pages about their city on Facebook told me they now viewed their city in a whole new light. A study I conducted on Reddit showed that people who participate in these online spaces are also more politically engaged and feel more closely tied to their communities. Good stewards don't just fill information gaps, but actively counter the platforms' worst tendencies. And you can be one of them.
Contributing to your local information ecosystem can also help you feel potent in the face of the national discourse. We’re going through a government shutdown right now, and while you may not be able to reinstate SNAP benefits for the entire nation, you can find out and synthesize how to donate to local food banks. These contributions don’t have to be constant: if you have 15 minutes free on a Sunday, you can make a difference to someone’s life.
I encourage you to take action on this today. You can start small: reply to questions on Nextdoor, or post useful information on your local Facebook group. Or go bigger: become a moderator on your local subreddit. Answer someone's question about the school board candidates. Share what you learned at the city council meeting. Explain ballot measures in plain language. You turned out to vote. Now get out and post.
Marianne Aubin Le Quéré is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She is a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest of the OpEd Project.
President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 3, 2026.
Will Trump’s moves ever awaken conservatives?
Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency in ways that could change America forever, and not for the better.
His naked self-dealing, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political foes, turning on our allies, the casino-fication of the White House — none of it bodes well for the future of our democracy, setting precedents that other presidents on both sides of the aisle could very well continue.
But one of the most obvious things Trump has changed in politics is its concern with ideology and principle. The long-held philosophy that used to bind the Republican Party together is gone, because he simply didn’t have a use for it.
For conservatives, that’s been especially disorienting and troubling. It began with Trump’s disregard for the debt and deficit, and carried through to this term’s embrace of tariffs, or protectionism. His personal disinterest in what the Christian right used to call “family values” dismantled the evangelical base of the party. And his courting of white nationalists and antisemites changed the face of the party.
None of that has been enough, however, to move conservative lawmakers to significantly break with Trump or even call him out. They happily co-signed his tariffs, watched as he exploded the debt and the deficit, turned the other way at his criminality and immorality, and defended police-attacking insurrectionists at the Capitol. He even managed to tick off the Second Amendment crowd with his crackdown on guns at protests and in Washington.
None of this is conservative. But so long as they kept winning, cowardly Republicans not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger didn’t seem to care.
But now, with a new idea hatched, will Republicans finally remember their conservative roots?
On Monday, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting.” It was a startling suggestion for a party that’s always concerned itself with state’s rights and federalism.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said.
The call is in service of his election lie, of course, an answer to the non-existent scourge of voter fraud that rigged just the 2020 election and somehow not the 2016 or 2024 elections.
Except Trump is the one attempting the rigging. He’s tried to end mail ballots and voting machines, sued two dozen blue states for their voter rolls, embarked on a rare mid-decade redistricting campaign, dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and pardoned dozens of people who signed false election certifications for him in 2020.
It’s tempting to dismiss the idea as merely a self-soothing ramble, the nonsensical blurting of an old man still fixated on an imaginary injustice. But it should offend and worry everyone, not least of all Republicans.
Elections are held locally for good reason — it’s harder to rig them that way. The Constitution says states shall determine the times, places and manner of elections, for the explicit purpose of decentralizing and protecting their integrity. It’s the backbone of federalism.
But for House Speaker Mike Johnson it’s nothing to get worked up about. “What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections.”
But Democrats are rightly concerned, and preparing for potential “federal government intrusion” in the midterms. “This is now a legitimate planning category,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “It’s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility.”
Extraordinarily sad, indeed. But will it revive the dormant conservatism in the Republican Party? Will lawmakers remember their principles and patriotism? Or will they continue to sleep through Trump’s total remaking of America’s political system?
Maybe this will be the thing that finally wakes them up.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.