Alan Greenblatt
Alan Greenblatt has been covering politics and government in Washington and around the country for 20 years. He came to NPR as a digital reporter in 2010, writing about a wide range of topics, including elections, housing economics, natural disasters and same-sex marriage.
He was previously a reporter with Governing, a magazine that covers state and local government issues. Alan wrote about education, budgets, economic development and legislative behavior, among other topics. He is the coauthor, with Kevin Smith, of Governing States and Localities, a college-level textbook that is now in its fourth edition.
As a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, he was the inaugural winner of the National Press Club's Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, which is given to outstanding reporters under the age of 35. Sadly, he no longer meets that requirement.
Along the way, Alan has contributed articles about politics and culture for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is happy to be working for an outlet where he has been able to write about everything from revolutions in the Middle East to antique jazz recordings.
Alan is a graduate of San Francisco State University and holds a master's degree from the University of Virginia.
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In all, 36 states will be voting for governor in 2014. All but a handful of those races will feature incumbents favored for re-election. Here's a look at a few who could be toast.
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For years, governors were considered the most pragmatic figures in politics. Now, they're using their states to run ideological experiments. -
The bombing and its aftermath revealed a massive, highly coordinated homeland security apparatus that can organize a mass casualty disaster or lock down a major American city at a moment's notice. Or both. -
Republicans in states that President Obama carried are looking at proposals to change the way Electoral College votes are given out. If these changes had been in place nationwide in November, Mitt Romney might have won.
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States are now governed pretty much by one party or the other, which nearly as often as not enjoys supermajority status in legislatures, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States. That means individual states will be moving in different direction on everything from abortion to tax policy — and many are likely to resist laws set in Washington. -
All large classes elected to Congress want to change Washington. The Tea Party has found that there are all kinds of tripwires built into the American system of checks and balances that prevent newcomers from quickly remaking the political culture into their own image. -
In the last election, the red states got redder and the blue ones bluer. That's true not only in presidential voting, but at the state level, where half the legislative chambers are now dominated by supermajorities of one party or the other. The result is that blue and red states are moving further apart on most major issues, including tax policy, abortion and guns. -
Many of the minority groups central to President Obama's victory had long supported Democrats. But he's the first party leader to put together a stable — and majority — coalition since Franklin D. Roosevelt back in the 1930s. This coalition promises to pay dividends to his party for years to come. -
The election problems in Florida that kept the nation waiting more than a month for the outcome of the presidential race back in 2000 have largely been resolved. But the state has come up with a whole new set of difficulties that led to long lines and another slow count. -
Other takeaways from the debate that was ostensibly about foreign policy: domestic issues; Obama on the attack; a strong but calm Romney; and an appeal to the base.
