Campaign themes

How does Ballotpedia...
...define candidacy?
...define incumbency?
...order candidate lists?
...choose battlegrounds?
...cover primaries?
...cover endorsements?
...cover campaign finance?
...cover polls?
...cover recall efforts?
...call an election?
...cover recounts?
...handle postponements?

The Campaign themes section of a Ballotpedia article is a standardized way to highlight the topics that each candidate emphasizes during a campaign. They are generally taken verbatim from the candidate. Campaign themes sections may appear on profile pages for federal, state, and local candidates.

Campaign themes give our readers the context to better understand a public figure's priorities, concerns, and reasons for seeking public office. Ballotpedia most often collects campaign themes from candidates' campaign websites, but newspaper profiles, candidate forums, media interviews, voter guides, candidate survey responses, and candidate YouTube videos are also used to generate content for this section. Candidates may also submit biographical details and campaign themes directly to Ballotpedia through our Candidate Connection survey.

Whenever possible, Ballotpedia prefers to include all text pertaining to an individual’s campaign themes. If a candidate's list of campaign themes is long, a scroll box will be used to prevent the section from taking up too much space on the page. Ballotpedia may, on occasion, choose to make an exception to this format.

An example of a campaign themes section can be found here.

Queries about why a certain campaign theme was (or was not) included on a Ballotpedia page can be emailed to editor@ballotpedia.org. Please include a link to the page in question.