On Sept. 2, a rarity will arrive in bookstores: a volume that manages to bridge the divides of today’s highly polarized politics.
That book is the Almanac of American Politics. An updated version of the Almanac has been published every two years since 1972, and at more than 2,000 pages — real paper pages, along with a digital version — it could easily serve as a doorstop. It is known as the “Bible of American Politics.”
Every new edition of the Almanac features profiles of all 435 members of the U.S. House, all 100 senators and all 50 governors, typically ranging from 1,000 to 2,500 words. It includes chapters describing each of the 435 congressional districts and all 50 states. It’s full of biographical, electoral and campaign finance data, and it even has profiles of the insular territories such as Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“The Almanac is more important than ever right now,” said Kirk Bado, editor of National Journal’s Hotline, a political tipsheet. “We are in an era where information is fractured, reality is partisan, and less than 8% of folks who do a search on Google don’t click a link if there’s an AI summary at the top. Good information is hard to come by when we’re flooded with bad information.”
Bado, a longtime fan of the Almanac before becoming a writer for the 2026 edition, said the Almanac “cuts through the sea of misinformation because it’s an authentic authority of a shared reality, compiled and researched by the best political reporters and analysts in the country. It’s as close to a primary source you can get without reading the Congressional Record and interviewing lawmakers yourself.”
Richard Cohen — who served as chief author for five volumes, from 2016 through 2024 — said the Almanac is unique in the polarized world of contemporary American politics.
“I would submit that our book is one of the few links in national politics that is widely shared, regardless of party, personal demographics or location,” Cohen said.
I am not unbiased about the Almanac: Full-time, I write for PolitiFact, the fact-checking publication that’s part of Poynter. In my spare time, I’m involved with the Almanac.
The 2026 edition — assembled in a five-month sprint starting right after the November 2024 elections — is the eighth I’ve written for since the 2000 edition. And for the first time this year, I am the chief author — only the third chief author in the Almanac’s 54-year history. It’s been a high point of my career.
The seed of the Almanac was planted in 1970 by a pair of Harvard undergraduates: Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa. As Barone recalled in the Almanac’s 50th anniversary edition, the two bonded over a love for American geography — Ujifusa was from Worland, Wyoming, and Barone from Detroit. Those cities, they realized, were connected by a road: U.S. Route 16.
The author’s complete run of Almanacs since 1972. (Courtesy of the author)
In May 1970, the United States seemed to be falling apart; the bombing of Cambodia turbocharged the antiwar movement. “It soon became clear to us that a reference book useful for antiwar protesters would also be useful for citizens of all views and interests,” Barone wrote. “Political junkies scattered across the country were always potential purchasers, but the commercial marketplace was probably proportionate to the square footage of Washington office buildings, which was expanding rapidly past a critical mass in the early 1970s.”
Barone, Cohen said, “deeply understood the broader political community as he created and sustained the Almanac. He deserves credit for his ability to reach across a variety of interests.”
In the internet age, it’s hard to imagine the challenges Barone, Ujifusa and a third Harvard undergraduate collaborator, Douglas Matthews, endured to produce that first Almanac. It required serious digging to get the most basic information. Barone recalls ordering a month’s worth of daily newspapers from all 50 states at an out-of-town newsstand. He and his co-authors used slide rules to calculate presidential results from old World Almanacs. They scribbled colored pencils on Rand McNally Road Atlases and used carbon paper in their typewriters.
I’m old enough to remember being handed enormous stacks of printed-out research from Nexis while working on my earliest Almanacs; today we click on links for news stories and file our chapters in Google Docs, where they are edited remotely.
But even though Barone and his co-authors never expected to create a long-lasting institution, their original format has stood the test of time. The Almanac’s fans continue to crave it.
When we asked Steve Kornacki, NBC News’ national political correspondent, to provide a blurb for the 2026 edition, he wrote back: “Literally the last thing I did before writing this was look up some information about a Colorado House district in the Almanac. I didn’t even bother to put it away on the shelf because I know I’ll be reaching for it again any minute now.”
The Almanac’s lyrical writing style was pioneered by Barone, and it’s something that all of us who keep the Almanac alive internalize as we write. I’ve always thought the quality of the writing set the Almanac apart from its onetime competitor, Congressional Quarterly’s more workmanlike Politics in America, which published its last edition in 2018.
The Almanac’s core focus is the cross-section of geography and politics. That’s what drew me to it in the first place.
In 1999, I was a young journalist with National Journal, the staunchly nonpartisan, serious-minded and highly wonkish weekly magazine that has long been affiliated with the Almanac. By then, I had developed a reporting wanderlust, scheduling working vacations for up to three and a half weeks at a time, for which I’d pitch editors in advance on up to to two dozen stories, set up all the meetings in advance, then travel through four or five states to do interviews, with a goal (by now nearly met) of filing a story from every state.
With this exposure to all corners of the country, and with Cohen’s support, I wrangled a junior contributor slot on the Almanac in 1999, starting by focusing on updating the congressional district descriptions.
I had to give up Almanac work for a few years after I left National Journal (as did Cohen when he left the company soon after). But in 2015, Cohen and fellow National Journal alum Jim Barnes saved the Almanac from a likely demise by striking a deal between National Journal and Columbia Books, which continues to publish the Almanac.
Over the next five editions, Cohen served as chief author. Then, late last year, he decided to step back into a more limited role. I inherited the daunting — but exhilarating — task of quickly assembling a team that could pick up the writing assignments Cohen had handled for the previous decade. Over a few weeks, I needed to recruit 16 new writers to collectively write the chapters Cohen used to handle. Luckily, the Almanac’s reputation as a way station for rising political journalists made the recruiting relatively easy.
“The writers love Congress,” said Abby Livingston, a congressional journalist for Puck and a contributor to several editions of the Almanac. “It’s written by people who can sort through the clutter and can pick out the arcs of a career in a limited space.”
The forthcoming 2026 Almanac. (Courtesy: Columbia Books)
We finished most of the writing — about 1,200 distinct chapters — in about four months, then spent until late June finalizing our edits and making late updates based on news developments. The data team in India and the U.S., supervised by editor Max Sinsheimer, crunched a mind-boggling amount of granular information. If all goes as planned, the book will have a two-month turnaround at the printer, in time for its early September release.
While the new volume will be closely scrutinized, older editions retain their value, encapsulating a half-century of American political history as if in amber. Barone recalled how his interview with then-Senate candidate Joe Biden in May 1972 helped inform his chapters about the future president for the next five decades.
The youngest generation of political aficionados — known (anachronistically) as Election Twitter — has discovered old editions of the Almanac as a place to submerge themselves in political history from well before they were born.
“Sometimes I’ll randomly pick an Almanac off my shelf and flip to the section on a state that I think I could learn more about, and I typically walk away with some useful bits,” said J. Miles Coleman, an early member of Election Twitter who is now associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “The Almanacs do a great job of describing districts and members in creative ways.”
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Receive a 15% discount on the Almanac of American Politics 2026 by going to the Almanac website and using the discount code Poynter26.
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Louis Jacobson is chief correspondent for PolitiFact, as well as — in his spare time — chief author of the Almanac of American Politics 2026.
