Keeping Our Webtexts Current: How We’re Staying Ahead During an Election Year

As an assistant editor, part of my job is to help keep our political science webtexts up to date. I do this by closely monitoring the news cycle, cataloging recent political events, and bringing them to our authors and editors for update considerations for next term.

We publish three political science webtexts: Central Ideas in American Government, Texas Politics, and Living Democracy. If you add them together, it’s over 600,000 words. It’s a priority for us to keep those 600,000 words relevant to students and reflective of the world they live in.

The same goes for graphics, videos, assignments, interactive timelines, and supplemental materials like lecture slides and test banks.

This year in particular has been ... eventful in politics. We’re currently working to include some of the biggest moments in our webtexts for the spring term. And we’re planning more updates for fall.

In this post, I’ll go over a few of these updates and why we feel it’s necessary to include them in the spring releases of our poli-sci books.

Supreme Court Updates

The U.S. Supreme Court Justices issued a whopping 17 decisions in their summer session alone this year. I flagged eight cases that we potentially needed to update in our webtexts.

As a rule, I flag cases that could affect our coverage of major political topics, such as gun rights, abortion rights, and freedom of speech. However, we don’t always incorporate every new Court case or decision into our webtexts. More content doesn’t equal better learning. To keep students focused and engaged, we’re always mindful to only include critical information that supports learning outcomes.

Of the eight cases I flagged, we’re including three for Spring 2025.

• United States v. Rahimi: We made sure to include this case in our Living Democracy “Pathways of Action” timeline specific to the gun control debate. These timelines are set up so that students can easily navigate the changes to Americans’ gun rights over time—from the very first Supreme Court case in 1846 all the way to Rahimi this year.

• FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine: In Central Ideas of American Government, we updated our chapter on interest groups to reflect this decision. We introduce and conclude the chapter with information on pro-life and pro-choice interest groups and their stances on the ongoing abortion debate. This case demonstrates a pro-life interest group’s active efforts to further their cause by challenging a drug’s FDA approval.‍

• Fischer v. United States: Students will learn more about this case in Central Ideas of American Government on our page covering civil discourse—and, of course, the events of January 6, 2021. Including this decision provides up-to-date information regarding those arrested at the Capitol.

Campaign Updates

Presidents and the campaigns they run come up a lot in our webtexts. Across all three texts, Biden and Trump combined were mentioned 2,176 times—this includes paragraph text, image captions, alt text, footnotes, and links. During the 2024 campaign, two historic events occurred that prompted us to search our webtexts to ensure our claims are accurate.

The first was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. While news was still breaking, I began searching our webtexts for any variation I could think of involving the word “assassination.” I needed to make sure we hadn’t made any claims about the length of time it’d been since the last assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in March 1981.

The second was Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Only seven U.S. presidents—including Biden—have not sought reelection in the entirety of the country’s history, the last being Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

We updated the webtexts to make Biden’s withdrawal clear. References to Biden’s “first term” became Biden’s “term.” Observations about how his administration would perform became factual, past-tense relayings of his actual actions. And on pages discussing past elections and front-runners, Biden’s withdrawal is included in detail.

We’re also including information in Central Ideas of American Government and Living Democracy on how both candidates leveraged different tactics to appeal to voters.

Election Updates

We have a lot of data that needs to be constantly monitored and updated. Here’s some new data that we’re including in charts for spring:

• 2024 voter turnout rate: Estimates from the University of Florida’s Election Lab
• 2024 Texas ideological identification: New polls from our friends at the Texas Politics Project on ideological identification among the Texas Republican Party and Texas Democratic Party
• 2024 presidential approval ratings: New data from Gallup

For spring, we’re also updating:

• An interactive map of battleground states and Electoral College votes
• Content on campaign promises and decisions (such as vice presidential picks, the status of Trump’s criminal cases, the Paris Agreement, and more)
• Content surrounding the end of Joe Biden’s presidency

For fall, we’re planning:

• Illustration updates showing party leadership roles in Congress (both federally and for Texas)
• Content updates on President Trump’s cabinet pending Senate approval
• Content updates on Texas’s potential Speaker of the House upset
• More detailed content updates on the presidential campaigns, including their use of social media, appearances, and endorsements

Looking Ahead

These updates require a considerable amount of time and effort from our authors, editors, and learning designers. But it’s worth it to provide students with the latest information to support the current events faculty want to discuss to engage their students!

You can learn more about our political science webtexts by heading over to our catalog page, where you can explore each webtext’s table of contents, peek inside the webtexts yourself, and hear from an instructor currently using them in their class.