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

Our webtexts have many advantages over traditional textbooks. They cost less, they engage students more, and they stay up to date.

We have the ability to edit our webtexts at any time to cover the latest developments in a given field—and students can access these updates in real time. When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, we had an asterisk in our texts the very next day to make students aware of her passing. And it’s not just text updates either. When Congressman Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House last October, we published a new in-text graphic just two days later.

Keeping our texts current and reflective of the world students live in is something we’ve been doing for years. We monitor the news and regularly manage an inventory of our webtexts, flagging and updating any content that either falls out of date or needs to be recontextualized in light of any new events.

We have two purposes behind these currency edits. First, our hope is that engaging with these current events in our webtexts will encourage students to stay informed. And second, we know that professors have a lot on their plate. Staying on top of the news cycle and incorporating topics into preexisting lesson plans can be hard. We keep our webtexts current so professors don’t have to do any extra work.

(Plus, the secret third reason: We want to create the best textbooks ever.)

In this blog post, I’m going to show you our process for updating our political science webtexts—and how we’ve kept up with this year’s tumultuous presidential race.

Conducting 2024’s Currency Audit

Soomo has three traditional political science webtexts: Central Ideas in American Government, Texas Politics, and Living Democracy. Each text tackles government and its concepts in a very different way, targeting and measuring student learning objectives with course features unique to the text. I began auditing these webtexts back in February for election updates and Supreme Court decisions.

We cover landmark Supreme Court cases like Obergefell v. Hodges in chapter content and also in Investigation pages. Investigation pages appear in every chapter of Central Ideas and Texas Politics. They dig deeper into important political topics, often showing students how government decisions shape various aspects of everyday life. Some of these Investigations focus solely on the stories behind Supreme Court cases. It’s critical for us to include these pages in our audits and update them whenever the Court issues new rulings (such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade).

Step One: Initial Research

My first step involved compiling a research document to focus solely on tracking Supreme Court cases. That document would eventually become 41 long pages of notes. I documented this research in three stages:

1. I took all mentions of Supreme Court cases in our webtexts and pasted the name, date, and outcome into an index in my research document. In Central Ideas in Government, I pulled 79 cases; in Texas Politics, I pulled eight; and in Living Democracy, 164.
2. I flagged cases I knew would be relevant or hot-button topics during the 2024 election. I flagged 16 in Central Ideas, two in Texas Politics, and 25 cases in Living Democracy.
3. I cross-referenced the Court’s 2023–2024 docket to see if there was any overlap with the cases I flagged. I found twelve cases that could potentially affect claims we make in our webtexts, depending on the outcomes.

Then it was time to get a little more organized. Luckily, since we do this every year—regardless of whether there’s an election—we already keep track of everything. We've identified:

• the page number we referenced an existing case on;
• the current, associated case;
• a quick summary of the details and how it was related to any past decisions;
• if editing would affect our in-text multiple-choice questions and test banks sent to instructors with each chapter; and
• all the sources consulted.

Once I completed my initial research, it was time for the next step.

Step Two: Flagging Content for Updates

I now began focusing on finding the instances in the webtexts where we referenced Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (At the time, they were looking like they would be two major-party candidates.) Across all three texts, Biden and Trump combined were mentioned 2,176 times—this includes in-text, alt text, footnotes, and links. I reviewed each mention to see if any data would need to be updated or tenses would need to be changed should Biden enter a second term or Trump be reelected.

There was also the Texas state election to consider. I searched our Texas Politics webtext for any mentions of specific offices. Then I checked the list of offices up for election in 2024 to see if any names we mentioned were either:

• not considering reelection,
• seeking another office, or
• seeking reelection but with opposition.

I noted which offices fell into these categories, the incumbent’s names, and the names of any opposition so it would be easy to update should the office fall into new hands.

Step Three: Catching Curveballs

While we stay current every year, 2024 is an election year, which means things get a little more complicated. As such, we determined that our audit should be more detailed and comprehensive than ever before. We wanted our editors and authors to have the ability to make updates with ease after the election. This meant we had to keep a close watch of the news cycle all year long.

The Supreme Court’s Summer Session

In late June, the Supreme Court began its summer session. The Justices issued a whopping 17 decisions. I read these decisions and noted whether or not they affected our coverage of any cases in the webtexts.

I also elaborated on whether the webtexts should be updated and why. From the summer session alone, I flagged nine cases that affected our webtexts. I remember sitting back in my chair, a smile on my face, thinking I could put the audit on pause for a little while.

Then the news hit: an assassination attempt had been made on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump

The aftermath of the first assassination attempt was absolute chaos. The gunman had fired shots while the event was being live streamed. Within minutes, the video was circulating all over social media and the news. Everyone was trying to get the first update and first word on the matter.

With speculation still going wild, 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 an assassination attempt on a former president or presidential candidate.

When I completed this, I mistakenly thought, once again, that news related to the race would settle down. Trump would eventually face a second assassination attempt—and again I would need to check our webtexts to ensure this news wouldn't make any of our claims inaccurate. But before that happened, one week after the first assassination attempt, President Biden made an announcement. He was dropping out of the race.

Joe Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race

Much like the assassination attempt, Biden’s withdrawal from the race was something that hadn’t happened in decades. The last time an incumbent did not seek reelection was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Only seven U.S. presidents have not sought reelection in the entirety of the country’s history.

Like in my previous pass, I made sure we didn’t make any claims in the webtexts about incumbents not seeking reelection. After that, I searched the audit for where I marked a page for an update if Biden were to enter a second term. I changed my note to ‘will need to update Democratic candidate’ since we still didn’t know if Harris would gain enough votes from delegates to receive the presidential nomination.

Kamala Harris Accepts Democratic Nomination

The Democratic National Convention took place on August 23rd. In accepting the nomination, Kamala Harris become the first Black woman and Asian American to lead a major party ticket. I searched our webtexts and flagged where we mentioned Harris in her role as vice president. Although Kamala lost the race, at the time we wanted to be prepared for both outcomes. Had she won, there would have been quite a few more “firsts” she’d have achieved—first female president, first Black female president, first Asian American president—that would have been important to acknowledge in the webtexts.

Looking Ahead

As of the time I write this blog post, the presidential race has just come to an end. Donald Trump has won the election. And we're currently hard at work updating our webtexts— including our graphs, charts, and timelines—with new election data and content.

Our authors and editors work closely together to make clean edits and quickly turn around content updates. Sometimes the edits are more surgical, like noting when a congress member gains a new appointment. Other times, the edits are much more comprehensive. They can include completely new chapter introductions and investigation pages. For example, the 12th edition of Central Ideas includes two new chapter introductions, extended discussions around abortion laws and COVID policies, as well as a new investigation and typology quiz to help students identify their own political values and attitudes.

Once our authors and editors turn over new content, our production and learning design teams then work on finalizing updates for students. (This might entail writing new learning objectives and in-text multiple-choice questions)

It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to keep the webtexts up to date, but it’s worth it to provide students with the latest information and to make things easier for the professors teaching them!

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.

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