Need political help to fix a research paper
Need political help to fix a research paper
20151120132330alex_mooney.docx
this is the work to be done on it.
Most importantly, you need to go back to the original assignment and make sure that you are answering the questions that are posed. The overall goal is to help you to understand congressional elections in general by examining one district in particular.
So far, your paper doesn’t really address the specific questions required by the assignment. (For example, when you are discussing how competitive the district is, you will want to refer to things like the Cook Partisan Voting Index. You will also need to mention the margin of victory of the sitting lawmaker in the previous election. These are all indicators of how firmly a legislator has a hold on his or her district.)
There are some standard sources that people generally consult when doing this type of analysis. Some of them I have shown in class. Another one is on reserve at the library – it is called The Almanac of American Politics, and it offers a lot of rich, objective, detailed analysis of each district in our country. You would be well served to look at the two or three pages in The Almanac devoted to Alex Mooney.
On another note, there is a lot of confusion in your paper about his state. He is a congressman from West Virginia, not Maryland. You seem to refer to both of them interchangeably.
Each question in the assignment is meant to help you to figure out the nature of a given lawmaker’s relationship to his or her district. Is she a freshman? Is she vulnerable? Is she a good fit for the district? Looking at the various indicators and data will help you to come up with a thoughtful analysis. Simply repeating a list of a lawmaker’s statements about this or that issue or offering a long description of a particular district are not all that helpful unless you can tie them together into a broader discussion about how this helps to explain that legislator’s grip on his or her seat in Congress.