PoliticallyPrimed is a personal project built around curiosity, research, and a belief that complicated subjects are usually more interesting when they are not reduced to simple narratives.
The site brings together interactive economic dashboards, research essays, and stories from history. Some pieces begin with data, others with primary-source documents, and others simply with a story that seemed too interesting not to explore. The common thread is an effort to look more closely—to add context, examine evidence, and leave room for complexity.
I’m Erik Harrelson, and the project began about a decade ago before gradually evolving into its current form. Rather than organizing the site around political parties, candidates, or the daily news cycle, I wanted a place where I could follow questions wherever they led—through economics, government documents, science, geopolitics, or history.
The essays are research-driven and may evolve as new evidence or data emerges. Whenever possible, primary sources are placed front and center so readers can examine the underlying material for themselves.
The goal is simple: to create a place for evidence, context, curiosity, and a little more complexity than the headline usually allows.
A note on AI and how the site is made:
PoliticallyPrimed makes use of artificial intelligence as a research and writing tool. Many of the essays and historical stories grew out of months of long-form conversations in which I developed the questions, supplied research and source material, challenged claims, and edited and shaped the direction of each piece, while AI often took the lead in drafting and organizing the final prose. The economic dashboards are based on data models and visualizations I originally developed independently in Power BI.
At the end of the day, PoliticallyPrimed is a hobby. It is not a business, and I am not trying to sell anything. I work on it in my spare time as a way to organize my thoughts and explore questions that interest me. So read, explore, and enjoy it with me.