Media critics have called for demoting “horse race” coverage in favor of paying more attention to what New York University’s Jay Rosen calls “not the odds, but the stakes.” This is a helpful frame in which to plan and prioritize your coverage during a midterm year already awash with inflamed rhetoric and constantly shifting players and motivations.
Covering election polls, for example, is no longer necessarily the default for local newsrooms. Below, we work through ways to reflect on your outlet’s poll coverage and how it engages your community.
Additionally, down-ballot races continue to be consequential at the local level — and it’s up to newsrooms to report on why they matter to your community. Ballot measures such as those addressing biological sex requirements for student athletes, gender-affirming care for minors and voting requirements call for clear-eyed reporting to break through the noise surrounding these contentious issues.
Prioritize which candidate or ballot questions to cover
While past coverage can help guide your planning, it is important not to make it the default. The electorate in your coverage area may have changed. New issues have emerged. What worked then may not work this time around.
Quick reflection: Where are our audience’s knowledge gaps in this election?
Why this works: Planning ahead will help you overcome the impulse to follow “the way we’ve always done it” model.
What this looks like in action: Choosing specific races or issues to cover allows you to prioritize accountability or solutions reporting.
- Here are four reporting threads the Associated Press considers when tracking legislative races.
- Try this step-by-step guide that will help you investigate the backgrounds of judicial candidates and judges who are making weighty decisions from the bench.
- The Nevada Independent outlines how it compared candidates’ public statements on government spending to loans they received from the government.
- In 2024, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta Civic Circle, a civic journalism nonprofit, collaborated on a voter guide — called Georgia Decides — that contained information on more than 700 candidates up and down the ballot.
Try this
Start here (90 minutes)
Create a complete inventory of races in your coverage area. Assign coverage priority to each of these races, knowing that your decision could change if circumstances do.
Consider the stakes for non-competitive races
Even in a race where a candidate is a shoo-in, can your journalism help people understand what’s likely to happen when this candidate wins? What policies will they prioritize? Does a candidate have things in their background that voters should know about? How did the candidates get nominated; was there competition in the nominating process?
Make sure your priorities align with your community’s
Even highly engaged voters can get to their polling stations and realize they didn’t fully understand every candidate and issue on the ballot. Revisit what you’ve learned when engaging your community and make sure your strategy is in alignment with the questions and concerns people shared.
How to report on polls and surveys
Public opinion polls — both those conducted for your own news organization and those done for others — can be challenging to cover. There are the tricky mechanics of the polls, which need to be accurately explained, and there is the larger question of how polls fit in your overall coverage.
Quick reflection: How has your previous poll reporting enhanced your coverage or informed your readers?
Why this works: Polls are inherently horse race-oriented, but they also provide a snapshot of public opinion. You may want to look for opportunities to frame polls in ways that add meaning and value — in other words, make the story about more than just the poll. You may also decide to forgo covering polls this year.
What this looks like in action: Poll coverage will look different from newsroom to newsroom. Here are a few different approaches.
- Examine the cross-tabs of major polls for story ideas that might be especially relevant to your readership. (The New York Times, for example, publishes the cross-tabs of its major polls.)
- The Cleveland Plain-Dealer doesn’t cover polls — and explained why to its readers.
- Here’s how the Associated Press decides whether to cover public opinion surveys.
Try this
Start here (45 minutes)
Take stock of what polls might be relevant to the races and ballot measures you’ve chosen to prioritize. Do they serve as high-level framing, or do they give you data to focus your reporting? Do they give you any new insights at all?
If you cover polls, write about them accurately
Make sure a person or a team fully understands margin-of-error, demographic weighting, the difference between a poll and a focus group, and other polling mechanics so they can answer staff (or audience) questions about it. Create boilerplate language to run when you publish poll stories that explain these issues.
Use polls to engage your community
This helps build audience engagement and gives people a sense that you are listening to them as well as informing them. Consider a feature that asks people some of the same questions the poll respondents were asked. Is there an interactive feature that people could use to show how their views align with or depart from the poll results?
