Washington Post reporter recognizes SIUE student’s political blog

An SIUE student’s blog about Florida politics received recognition last month from a Washington Post reporter.

Political science major David Trotter and his co-writer Kartik Krishnaiyer were named by Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza for their work on The Political Hurricane.

Cillizza, who writes “The Fix,” a Washington Post political blog, compiles a list of the best statewide political blogs, and Trotter’s blog was “one of the best in Florida, along with four other blogs in the state,” according to Trotter.

In the last month, Trotter said Krishnaiyer  and he “kind of got disenfranchised with Florida politics” and took a break from blogging.

“One of the other people who was recognized as well, he told us that we were recognized and so we found out by a complete shock that this was what happened…,” Trotter said. “We weren’t even trying for this… then all of a sudden get word we were up there.”

Krishnaiyer  said he found out about the recognition through Cillizza’s Twitter account and was thrilled.

“[Cillizza] tweeted it, and saw it, and I want to say I saw it like two days after the fact, after he had actually done it,” Krishnaiyer said.

Krishnaiyer said he also did not realize that The Political Hurricane was “on their radar.”

“[Cillizza] actually followed me on Twitter, but I had no idea he read our stuff…,” Krishnaiyer said.

Trotter said he was happy with the recognition and because of the recognition decided to blog more regularly.

“Initially [the recognition] gave us the motivation to reignite it, but even since then we’ve kind of backed off,” Trotter said.

Trotter said he has been involved with Florida politics since 1991, and in 2010 Krishnaiyer and he decided to “put down on paper what we thought about politics in Florida.”

“We figured we’d put it in a public forum basically to be shared by everyone,” Trotter said.

Though Trotter is originally from Chicago, he lived most of his life in Florida and was involved in the Democratic Party from the age of 17.

“I have deep roots in knowing the history of Florida politics just because I had been involved with the system there on the ground in Florida for so many years…,” Trotter said.

But when Trotter initially started the blog, he said it was not going to “Florida centered,” but rather for him to make predictions on political races.

“This is a progressive blog instead of [an] overall political blog. After 2010… especially in Florida, the shift kind of changed to being a blog basically criticizing how democrats did poorly and what they needed to do to increase their output in Florida,” Trotter said.

Trotter said “Florida democratic politics makes it very easy” to continue to find new ways to talk about the same subject.

“And it’s not controversy or anything. Look at Florida as a state where President Obama won it twice…. Clinton won it once. It’s debatable if Al Gore won it or not…,” Trotter said. “[You] have a state which has a trend of going democratic in presidential years, [but the] republican [party] has the super majority…”

Republicans are “very dominant at the local level,” according to Trotter, and part of the blog’s goal is to contrast what is being done at the state level and why compared to “why someone like Barack Obama continues to win the state.”

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