is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. I would like to thank Jennifer Wolak and three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions.

Many different elements make up the strength of a president, but a president with a majority in both houses of Congress works from a position of power. While a congressional majority does not guarantee that a president can pass his agenda (witness Jimmy Carter and the first two years of the Clinton presidency), a president that has majority in Congress will have natural allies instead of natural enemies when he works to enact his legislative agenda.

The nature and frequency of voter fraud figure prominently in many ongoing policy debates about election laws in the United States. Policy makers frequently cite allegations of voter fraud reported in the press during these debates. While recent studies find that voter fraud is a rare event, a substantial segment of the public believes that voter fraud is a rampant problem in the United States. It stands to reason that public beliefs are shaped by news coverage of voter fraud. However, there is very little extant academic research on how the news media, at any level, covers allegations or documented cases of voter fraud. This paper examines local newspaper attention to voter fraud in each of the 50 states during the 2008 and 2012 US elections. The results show that local coverage of voter fraud during the 2012 elections was greatest in presidential swing states and states that passed restrictive voting laws prior to the 2012 election. No evidence that newspaper attention is related to the rate of actual voter fraud cases in each state was found. The findings are consistent with other studies indicating that parties and campaigns sought to place voter fraud on the political agenda in strategically important states to motivate their voting base ahead of the election.

To what degree do the news media provide voters with the information needed to hold House members accountable for their actions in Congress? Previous studies have simply debated whether or not local news media cover politicians' actions, but this article considers the news media as a strategic actor when covering House members. I developed a set of theoretical expectations about the conditions under which local news media would be more or less likely to monitor the actions of members of Congress outside of election seasons. I tested these expectations using an extensive content analysis of local newspapers in both descriptive and multivariate settings. I find that local news media are strategic in their coverage of local members of Congress. Local newspapers invest more resources to cover out‐of‐step members than they do to follow members with policy preferences congruent with the district's. In addition, coverage of out‐of‐step members tends to be less positive than coverage of in‐step members.