Hi!
My name is Talia Diller, and I am a political science and journalism student at UW–Madison and the creator of The Local Gap.
I built this project because I kept noticing the same thing: students here care deeply about politics, but local elections, the ones that shape housing, transit, policing and campus life in Madison, feel distant, confusing or easy to miss.
After interviewing students, city officials and researchers, I became convinced the problem is not apathy. It is access. Local political information is harder to find, harder to follow and less visible in the feeds and platforms students actually use.
I cover local and state politics for The Daily Cardinal’s state news desk, where my focus is making complex systems legible for people who don’t have time to decode them. Studying political science, journalism and digital media analytics has sharpened that instinct. I’m interested in why civic information fails to reach people and what it looks like when it does.
The Local Gap is my attempt to close that distance. It brings together election guides, candidate information and plain-language explanations of how Madison politics works, built specifically for students navigating this city alongside everything else.
Madison is more than where we go to school. It is where we live, build community and figure out what we actually care about. This project is my way of making local democracy feel like it belongs to that life.
thelocalgap.com 