The 2026 midterm elections are imminent. While it’s debatable that this is one of the most consequential election cycles in decades, there are at least two things that make it distinctive. First, President Trump has upended former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s astute observation that “all politics is local.” It is impossible to overstate how much of a factor the president will be in local elections. Trump looms large.
This is also an election muddied by deepening questions about the veracity of U.S. elections, what impediments voters may encounter, and what’s ultimately at stake for the American people.
In July, Pew Research Center polled 3,554 adults in the U.S. and reported that just 55% of Americans are confident that the November midterm elections will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” down from 61% in advance of the 2024 election — and 64% in the lead-up to the 2022 election.
On the voting beat
“I think we all understand our country is in the middle of a very lengthy and ongoing discussion about whether elections are fair,” said Carrie Levine, editor-in-chief of Votebeat. “That’s what people are talking about. There are people on all political sides of this who have various concerns about whether the deck is stacked, whether elections are fair. They’re having trouble understanding how they work and why they work the way they do. Our mission is really to provide clarity around that. There is a lot of appetite for greater civic knowledge about how this all works, and we exist to serve that.”
Levine got her professional start reporting from local newsrooms in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Life then took her to Washington, D.C., where she began covering lobbying for titles like National Law Journal and Legal Times. While reporting on K Street, she became keenly interested in questions about democracy and influence. In 2010, she joined the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as a research director, and later, spent eight years at the Center for Public Integrity, covering influence, money, politics and elections.
She first joined Votebeat as managing editor and then became editor-in-chief. In addition to Levine, the newsroom leadership team includes Editorial Director Jessica Huseman, Managing Editor Nathaniel Rakich, and Lauren Aguirre, growth and community editor.
The reporting team is stationed in five states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas and Arizona. Votebeat recently added a national reporter to the team.
The newsroom produces a lot of explainers about voting procedures at the state and local levels — and how federal laws come into play. Recent reporting focused on lawsuits playing out between a collection of states refusing to turn over voter records to the Trump administration.
“We are trying to explain these issues in terms that are clear and not just people yelling at each other,” the editor-in-chief said.
Votebeat publishes a website, a national newsletter and newsletters in each of the states where reporters are stationed. Readers also find their content through social sites like Reddit and news aggregators like Apple News.
They experiment with storytelling. Last year, to explain how ranked-choice voting works, they produced a sample ballot with their reporters’ pets as candidates.
“We did a story in Arizona about translating the ballot into Navajo — the challenges and complexities of translating into Navajo, which is an oral language. As part of that, we had audio and video embedded in the story, and we also did a TV segment that ran on public TV stations,” said Levine. “The reporter, Jen Fifield, did a wonderful job with a really nuanced, interesting story.”
Misinformation is an evergreen challenge for newsrooms like Votebeat. And that’s playing out in this election cycle. “For instance, our Wisconsin reporter earlier this year wrote about a social media post shared by the president, which misinterpreted the way Wisconsin manages its rules. There’s a longstanding misleading claim that, in several states including Wisconsin, the state has more registered voters than people who are eligible to vote. That claim conflates different datasets in a way that can be confusing.”
This year, Votebeat also created an invaluable resource for local newsrooms: an “Election Expert Desk.”
“If you’re a journalist, you can sign up to be admitted to a Slack workspace, where we’re going to have over 100 vetted election experts in different parts of election administration. We’re going to have litigators and people who understand everything from how lines at polling places work to ballot design,” said Levine.
The editor-in-chief offered some practical advice for newsrooms that don’t do this reporting year-round: “The best time to talk to an election administrator and prepare for covering an election is not a few weeks before Election Day. It’s three months before the primary.” Develop those relationships and seize the opportunity to observe voting-machine tests, she suggested.
Covering the midterms at three speeds
November marks two special occasions for Chris Megerian — his one-year anniversary as The Associated Press’ U.S. politics editor, and the first midterm election he’ll cover in this role.
Megerian is based in Washington, D.C., but the politics team is decentralized and stationed all around the country. It operates separately from AP’s White House and congressional teams, he explained. In addition to Megerian, there are two other editors — Sara Burnett in Chicago and Tom Verdin in Sacramento, California — and 12 reporters.
Megerian described how the team “operates at three speeds.” There is the careful long-term planning around typical coverage buckets. Then comes the week-to-week newsgathering. And finally, there’s the fast-paced “minute-by-minute” reporting that requires them to be nimble when breaking news happens.
“There are a lot of surprising things that can happen in politics,” Megerian said. “Day to day can feel very uncertain, and this has been a chaotic year. If you look at the beginning of the year, there was no war in Iran. The congressional map looked different than it looks now. Things move quickly. We expected the economy to be a big issue, and it is. We expected divisions over the U.S. support for Israel to be a big deal, and it absolutely is. There’s a lot that you can plan for ahead of time, as long as you stay focused on the big issues.”
“The final decisions will be made by the voters. They’re going to tell us what they think is important,” said Megerian.
On election night, “every single person on the team is fully engaged,” including a D.C.-based race-calling team. He described the experience — of months’ worth of reporting building to the final race-calling — as “a massive tectonic plate that snaps into place in that moment.”
Characters on the political stage
The 2026 midterm election promises to be a “change election” and a final referendum on President Donald J. Trump, according to Hugh Dougherty, executive editor at The Daily Beast.
The digital news outlet reports 27 million unique monthly users across its platforms — the website, newsletters and podcasts. This past September, it launched a new newsletter: “Midterms Meltdown.”
E&P spoke with Dougherty on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, mere weeks before what he referred to as a “macro election” — meaning, even local races have become affirmation or rejection of national politics.
The Daily Beast’s approach to covering the midterms is “character-driven,” Dougherty explained: “We follow the characters that people want to know about — and that we believe people should know about. And, of course, the biggest character is Trump.”
Engagement data indicates Beast readers are intrigued by people like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Texas’ James Talarico, a Democrat campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat, and Republican Senators Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell. They’re also interested in people in the president’s orbit, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt — “who are themselves not necessarily running for election but are critical to how people form their opinions,” Dougherty clarified.
“Readers are interested in the over-the-horizon view, and this election’s effect on the 2028 presidential race,” Dougherty said. They are also intensely interested in election security.
“Is there going to be meddling? Are there going to be attempts to subvert the democratic (small d) verdict? People are absolutely interested in that,” he said.
Doing this type of high-profile reporting sometimes draws the ire of powerful people and their lawyers.
“There is no doubt that we get more threats and intimidating language than we ever saw before,” Dougherty said. Just last year, the newsroom mounted a defense against a defamation suit filed by Chris LaCivita, a former campaign manager for President Trump. The case was ultimately “dismissed with prejudice.”
“We report rigorously. We report fairly. We always seek comment ... from the people we’re reporting on. It’s not, ultimately, going to stop people who want to sue the press from trying to sue the press, but our responsibility is to our readers — to give them absolute assurance that what they read is trustworthy and that we have gone to great lengths to try to be fair to the people about whom we report,” Dougherty said.
“Some of the responses we get, particularly from the White House and from people in other parts of the administration, can be abusive. They can be crude insults about us, and particularly about the reporter writing the story,” he continued. “I think that, in its own way, is about challenging the press. But we publish those statements, and I think our readers can judge for themselves whether to trust what they read from our well-reported stories or what is often just cut-and-pasted insults from junior White House spokespeople.”
The election-night rush
“You can’t beat election night as a reporter. I was working at AP at the time of Bush v. Gore. Watching that unfold was insane. … It’s almost like covering the Super Bowl for a sports reporter. There is a certain tension, uncertainty and drama to it,” said Robert Gehrke, who has reported on government and politics for more than 30 years. Gehrke’s current role is politics reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, where he’s part of a four-person Statewatch team.
“In Utah, our elections are a little bit dull this year, just because we’ve got four congressional seats that are not likely to be very competitive,” Gehrke said. However, there are a few intriguing county-level races unfolding.
In September, the team reported on the ongoing legal battles playing out between the Trump administration, Utah and other states that have rejected the federal government’s demands for voting data.
Though mail-in voting is “extremely popular in the state,” according to Gehrke, the laws have been contested and changed. Eligible voters used to automatically receive a ballot by mail; now they must opt in to receive one. The Tribune’s Emily Anderson Stern wrote an explainer for voters.
“That story got a lot of eyeballs. … Utility journalism, as we call it in the business, has been valuable,” Gehrke said.
This year, the Statewatch team also produced a voter guide, based on templated Q&A questions asked of each candidate on the ballot — policy questions around the issues voters say matter most: government corruption, affordability, housing, groceries, water concerns and data centers.
“Election security, in the lead-up to the election at least, has been a hot topic,” he said. “I think that’s common throughout the country. The arguments for additional restrictions or additional protections are a little bit nebulous just because there’s not concrete evidence of widespread malfeasance. I think a lot of this is trickling down from the national level. It’s gotten legs here and obviously everywhere.”
On Election Day, it will be an all-hands-on-deck effort. Tribune reporters will be out the community covering polling places. They’ll make the rounds at victory celebrations and concession speeches. Designated lead writers will be back in the newsroom. They’ll host a live blog as results come in. “In the past, we found that to be more efficient — to have the writers with the editors, so they can get the reporting pushed out,” he said.
Even after 30 years covering politics, Gehrke reflected: “There is an energy to being in the war room on election night when the results start coming in. … It crackles, and it is still pretty fun.”
Gretchen A. Peck is E&P’s editor-in-chief. She welcomes your emails at editor@editorandpublisher.com.
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