Threats against poll workers made national news following false claims from former President Donald Trump and supporters that Joe Biden had fraudulently won the 2020 presidential election.

For example, in Georgia “two local election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss were pressured to make false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” write the authors of a 2022 essay on local political violence, published in the State and Local Government Review. “After refusing to lie, a far-right media outlet spread conspiracies about the two women that resulted in a mob surrounding their house.”

In April 2024, a federal judge upheld a $148 million judgment for Freeman and Moss from a civil case against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who admitted to making false claims about the poll workers.

Poll workers perform fundamental tasks in democratic societies, ensuring citizens can safely and freely cast their ballots for measures and candidates, often working long hours on Election Day for low pay.

More than 900,000 poll workers staffed early voting sites and Election Day polling places during the 2016 national elections in the U.S., according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. That number dipped to about 775,000 for 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed in-person voting.    

Poll workers are often temporary government employees hired to help on Election Day, though they almost always undergo training beforehand. They greet voters, remind them of their voting district, verify their eligibility, help them use voting equipment, assist voters with disabilities and register voters in states that allow same-day registration, among other tasks.

While poll worker job titles vary by election district, districts may hire a clerk in charge of overall operations on Election Day along with assistant clerks, equipment operators, inspectors who verify that voters are registered, and deputies who greet voters.

Pay varies by election administration jurisdictions, which usually align with county boundaries. In Miami-Dade County, for example, poll workers are paid between $200 and $346 including training, pre-election setup and Election Day duties.

Most poll workers in New York City get $250 for Election Day and are expected to work from 5 a.m. to after 9 p.m., when polls close. In rural Coffee County, Alabama, Election Day pay maxes out at $185.

Election officials, by contrast, are government employees who work on Election Day but also during the rest of the year to prepare for and administer elections.

Journalists can reach out to election officials or visit election office websites to find poll worker duties and job titles. The nonpartisan U.S. Vote Foundation offers this election official directory by state.

Poll worker intimidation and threats

Poll workers are often motivated by civic duty, according to research and reporting featured in the tipsheet below. Despite their commitment to democracy, poll workers have recently been increasingly concerned about threats and violence while doing their jobs.

More than one-third of election officials — 38% — have experienced “threats, harassment, or abuse” specifically because of their job, finds a 2024 survey of 928 local election officials conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

That’s up from 30% who reported the same the year prior. More than half of the officials surveyed in 2024 by the Brennan Center said they are worried about the safety of their staff in future elections and 92% have enacted measures to protect voters and poll workers since 2020.

Some 28% indicated they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about harassment or threats aimed at their family or loved ones while 27% were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about being assaulted at home or work.

Looking to November

The 2024 presidential race is poised to be a rematch between Trump and Biden.

The ongoing potential for threats to poll workers and election officials is real enough that the U.S. Department of Justice has launched a task force to address those threats.

But some election officials don’t think the task force is doing enough. National Association of State Election Directors Executive Director Amy Cohen in June told reporter Zachary Roth with the nonprofit Oregon Capital Chronicle that it is “very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

At the same time, threats do not always come to the attention of police — 45% of local election officials surveyed by the Brennan Center who reported being threatened did not file a report to law enforcement.

We put together this tipsheet, mostly based on recent academic research, to bolster your coverage of threats and violence against election workers in advance of Election Day 2024.

1. Understand the social forces that tend to lead to political violence.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, identifies four risk factors for political violence in an October 2021 paper in the Journal of Democracy. Kleinfeld defines political violence broadly as “physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life.”

To identify social and political situations that increase the risk for political violence, she draws from examples of political violence abroad, such as anti-Muslim attacks during the political rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the early 2000s.

The risk factors, according to Kleinfeld, are:

• A contested election with high stakes for the balance of power. “For much of U.S. history, one party held legislative power for decades,” Kleinfeld writes. “Yet since 1980, a shift in control of at least one house of Congress was possible — and since 2010, elections have seen a level of competition not seen since Reconstruction.”
• Partisanship based on broad groups. “Up to the 1990s, many Americans belonged to multiple identity groups –for example, a union member might have been a conservative, religious, Southern man who nevertheless voted Democratic,” Kleinfeld writes. “Today, Americans have sorted themselves into two broad identity groups: Democrats tend to live in cities, are more likely to be minorities, women, and religiously unaffiliated, and are trending liberal. Republicans generally live in rural areas or exurbs and are more likely to be white, male, Christian, and conservative.”
• Election rules, such as winner-take-all, that let candidates exploit partisanship. “Winner-take-all elections are particularly prone to violence, possibly because small numbers of voters can shift outcomes,” Kleinfeld writes. “Two-party systems are also more correlated with violence than are multiparty systems, perhaps because they create us-them dynamics that deepen polarization.”
• A lack of institutional checks on political violence. “The United States suffers from three particularly concerning institutional weaknesses today — the challenge of adjudicating disputes between the executive and legislative branches inherent in presidential majoritarian systems, recent legal decisions enhancing the electoral power of state legislatures, and the politicization of law enforcement and the courts,” Kleinfeld writes.

Kleinfeld concludes: “Although political violence in the United States is on the rise, it is still lower than in many other countries. Once violence begins, however, it fuels itself. Far from making people turn away in horror, political violence in the present is the greatest factor normalizing it for the future.”

2. Know that a small but notable segment of the U.S. population thinks political violence is sometimes justified.

To capture a snapshot of Americans’ views of political violence, nine scholars affiliated with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, conducted a nationally representative survey with 8,620 participants during the summer of 2022. Results were published in September 2023 in the journal Injury Epidemiology.  

Nearly 20% of those surveyed strongly or very strongly agreed that having a “strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” About 14% strongly or very strongly agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.” And nearly 8% reported that in the future they would be very or extremely likely to be “armed with a gun” in a situation where political violence is justified.

The researchers define political violence as “the use of physical force or violence to advance political objectives.” When they asked participants to imagine a scenario in which they believed political violence was justified “to advance an important political objective,” nearly 22% responded that political violence is never justified.

But, given the same scenario, 4.5% responded that they would be sometimes, very or completely willing to use violence against a poll worker and 6.1% reported the same for using force or violence against an elected local official.

The authors estimate 8 million adults in the U.S. think violence in general can be justified to make political gains, though they emphasize caution since their survey is small compared with the overall population. 

“Our extrapolations also suggest that millions of Americans would be very or completely willing to engage in violence themselves to advance a political objective that they support; between 5 and 6 million people would threaten or intimidate someone, injure them, or kill them,” the authors write.

3. Remind audiences of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

While recent violence and threats toward poll workers may seem startling to audiences, they should be made aware of the long history of electoral violence in the U.S.

For example, Black politicians faced violent attacks from white individuals and mobs following the Civil War. This violence formed the foundation for Jim Crow laws that segregated public facilities for white and Black Americans and sharply curtailed Black voting rights for generations.

“The pursuit of legalized voter suppression by Southern Democrats only became possible once violence had been successful enough to put Democrats back in power, Southern state governments (re)developed electoral institutions, and national Republicans abandoned black voters,” write the authors of a March 2019 paper in Perspectives on Politics.

Before and after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s outlawed Jim Crow era segregation, Black voters attempting to register in the south faced physical threats and violence, including from white individuals, mobs and law enforcement.

“Sporadic violence to discourage black political participation persisted as late as the 1960s and lynching continued to be a tool to limit black civil rights, repress black labor, reinforce white racial solidarity, and punish blacks for alleged crimes for many years,” write the authors of the Perspectives on Politics paper.

4. Interview poll workers about what motivates them.

Despite sometimes facing threats to their safety, many poll workers remain resilient in their commitment to facilitating free and fair elections in the U.S. In reviewing recent research, the authors of a chapter in a 2024 book on lessons learned from the 2020 presidential race, published by academic press Springer Link, relay that civic duty and social engagement are top motivators for poll workers.

The authors also conduct their own survey on what motivates poll workers — specifically, 1,729 poll workers in Miami-Dade County during early 2021. Those surveyed were most motivated by being part of the democratic process, performing their civic duty or wanting “to make a difference.”

They were least motivated by financial considerations, such as making some extra money, a finding that tracks with a quarter of participants being retired and despite large job losses at the time stemming from COVID-19 business closures.

But, the authors note, returning poll workers were more interested in pay than first-time poll workers, suggesting that “financial motivations may be less important for recruitment of new poll workers but may become increasingly important for retaining poll workers from election to election.”

The poll workers in Miami motivated by a sense of civic duty are not alone. For example, a poll worker near Seattle received an envelope of white powder while counting mail-in ballots during November 2023. But the elected official in charge told Stateline reporter Matt Vasilogambros that after the fire department arrived, “everybody marched right into that building, and said, ‘Oh, heck no, you are not disrupting the democratic process.’”

5. Understand how election officials try to manage the emotional burden of intimidation, for themselves and their staff.

Poll workers are often steadfast in their commitment to the democratic process, but intimidation and violence can take an emotional toll on them.

Experts and journalists who have researched and worked with trauma survivors say trauma-informed journalism is a good way to tell better, more accurate stories and help protect survivors from further harm.

“Most election workers come to the job with a strong sense of patriotism and pride in their work,” write the authors of a November 2022 article in the journal Administration and Society. “The enthusiasm election workers have for their job is crucial to maintaining trust in the system and creating a connection with the citizen-customer.”

For many citizens, the voting experience and interactions with poll workers “can shape voter perceptions of the government in a broader sense,” the authors write. For poll workers, greeting citizens in a friendly way and doing their best to ensure a smooth voting experience is part of what the authors call “emotional labor,” borrowing a phrase from past research.

For example, the burden of emotional labor might be high for a poll worker who is tired at the end of a long Election Day but is still expected to be helpful and courteous to voters.

The authors of the Administration and Society article identify three ways election administrators have recently tried to relieve or limit the emotional labor of poll workers in the face of violence or violent threats. Some are leaning into more public outreach, while others are making their election offices and workers less accessible to the public.

• Administrative strategies “focus on changes to the way the job is done to avoid burnout from emotional labor,” the authors write. This may include administrators investing in public education campaigns and offering tours of poll sites to build trust with voters they serve. Strategies may also include establishing election associations for officials to share best practices for combating misinformation and ensuring poll worker safety.
• Security strategies “may encompass tactics to protect and manage any direct and indirect attack or threat,” the authors write. Some election officials have put bulletproof glass in their offices and have decreased public outreach. Training for some poll workers now includes “deeper security instructions and quick ways to contact the main election office in the case of incidents.”
• Personal protective strategies, such as those used by the city clerk of Detroit, who “took firearms training and now carries a concealed weapon after receiving threats, including one outside of her home,” the authors write. Other officials, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have requested more police presence at polling places and election offices following threats.

6. Note the difference between poll watchers and poll workers.

Poll workers and poll watchers sound similar but they’re very different. While poll workers are employed by election administration offices, poll watchers, sometimes called “election observers,” are members of the public or partisan groups interested in observing parts of the Election Day process.

States have different rules for people interested in observing voting. In certain jurisdictions they may be able to arrive early to polling sites and verify that voting machines are empty of ballots, watch election officials testing voting machines and other routine but important parts of setting up on Election Day.

Poll watchers are often members of partisan groups or political parties that may favor or oppose certain candidates or ballot measures. Election administration agencies may offer guides detailing poll watcher rights and rules.

They generally are allowed only to ensure that the voting process appears fair. No one watching an election may disrupt the process. States also restrict electioneering — trying to influence voters by handing out pamphlets or partisan apparel, for example — near polling sites.

But poll watchers too have a fraught history. During Reconstruction and again during the 1950s and 1960s, poll watchers intimated racial minorities attempting to exercise their right to register and vote. More recently, before the 2020 presidential election, Trump called on supporters to volunteer as poll watchers and “watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” none of which happened.

Other resources

Academic

Georgetown University Law Center | What to do if armed groups are near polling or registration places

MIT Election Data + Science Lab | Opting Out? Recent Challenges in Recruiting and Retaining Poll Workers

Election Law Journal | What Do We Actually Know About Poll Worker Recruitment in the United States?

Federal government

U.S. Department of Justice | Public Integrity Section annual reports

U.S. Election Assistance Commission | Election Administration and Voting Survey reports | Election Official Security

Nonprofit

Brookings Institution | The Americans on the front lines of elections

U.S. Vote Foundation | Election Official Directory

National Association of State Election Directors | State voter information

National Association of Election Officials | Board of Directors

News coverage

NBC News | Election worker turnover has reached historic highs ahead of the 2024 vote, new data shows

Oregon Capital Chronicle | Election workers worry that federal threats task force isn’t enough to keep them safe

Stateline | In face of threats, election workers vow: ‘You are not disrupting the democratic process’

The New York Times | Election Workers Face Flood of Threats, but Charges Are Few

The post Reporting on violence and threats against US election workers: 6 things to know appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

School board elections have grown increasingly politicized in recent years as conservative politicians and advocacy organizations push to restrict how public schools address issues related to race, gender and sexuality.

But the job of school board members, many of whom are unpaid volunteers, isn’t just setting education policy. In fact, they oversee and make decisions about a range of programs and projects, including the school district’s annual budget, which, in the largest cities, can total tens of billions of dollars.

Their primary responsibility: Being a watchdog for their communities to ensure public money is well spent, schools and buses are safe, and students receive a high-quality education.

Nationwide, more than 82,000 people served on school boards in more than 13,000 public school districts during the 2022-23 academic year, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan online political encyclopedia. Texas alone has 1,022 school districts.

The vast majority of board members are elected to office. And this fall, counties, cities and towns in many states will hold school board elections.

These races tend to be decided by a small number of people, however. A “discouragingly low” number of voters participate in school board elections — often 5% to 10%, according to the National School Boards Association. Even when voters show up at the polls, many skip school board races because they tend to appear at the bottom or on the back of their ballots.

Nonprofit groups such as Campaign for Our Shared Future and the XQ Institute are trying to change that by calling attention to the importance of school board elections.

Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty, a conservative political organization, and Run for Something, a progressive political organization, are vying to get their candidates seated on local school boards.

Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by two former school board members in Florida, has grown to 130,000 members and 300 chapters in 48 states, according to its X account. Of the 166 school board candidates it publicly endorsed in 2023, 54 won their elections, according to a recent analysis from the nonprofit think tank the Brookings Institution.

Last year, Run for Something endorsed 416 candidates running for various local offices across the U.S. and 226 won, according to the group’s 2024 Strategic Plan. Late last year, Run for Something announced its 50 State School Board Strategy to “fight back and recruit and train young, diverse progressive candidates for school board.”

Guidance for journalists

To help journalists cover school board elections, we’ve gathered and summarized six academic studies that look at how school board members are chosen and the impact they can have on school funding and student achievement.

Journalists need to keep in mind that while school boards make decisions on such things as book bans and which bathrooms transgender children use, their overarching goal is ensuring nearly 50 million students in pre-kindergarten through 12^th grade develop the skills necessary to get jobs, go to college or otherwise become responsible adults.

The most recent research suggests:

• Most people who vote in school board elections in California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma are white and likely don’t have children in local public schools. Estimates further suggest that in at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students are racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters are white.
• Teacher unions maintain a strong influence over school board elections in Florida and California, where most candidates endorsed by teacher unions prevail.
• In North Carolina, public schools become less racially segregated when Democrats join school boards than when someone affiliated with another political party or someone with no party affiliation joins.
• Student test scores rise and schools serving large percentages of Hispanic students receive more funding in California when a white school board member is replaced by someone who is not white.

Although much of the most recent research on U.S. school board elections focuses on a small group of states, these studies provide insights on issues affecting school boards nationwide.

We elaborate on these studies below. But first, we’d like to spotlight three important pieces of context journalists should consider including in news stories about school board elections.

• Voter turnout in school board races is notoriously low in some parts of the U.S. In Newark, New Jersey, for example, about 3% to 4% of voters typically participate in school board elections, according to Chalkbeat Newark. Only a few hundred people voted in the school board election held in April in Oklahoma City, home to more than 700,000 people, the Oklahoma State Election Board reports.
• In many communities, most school board members are white men. Ballotpedia examined the demographics of more than 82,000 people who served on school schools during the 2022-2023 academic year and found that 52% were male and 43% were female. In Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, more than 60% were men. Meanwhile, 78% of school board members who participated in a survey the National School Boards Association conducted in 2017 and 2018 identified as white.
• School board elections are generally nonpartisan, but that may be changing. In nonpartisan races, candidates’ political party affiliation, if they have one, is not listed on the ballot. In November, Florida voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution to allow school board elections there to be partisan. In recent months, legislators in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire have introduced bills to make school board elections partisan in those states. In North Carolina, where counties can decide whether their school board races are partisan, a growing number of boards have made the change.

No organization tracks school board elections in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. However, Ballotpedia provides information on elections in 475 of the largest school districts, including the 100 most populous cities.

Research roundup

The Democratic Deficit in U.S. Education Governance
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Political Science Review, March 2021.

The study: Researchers looked at how the demographics of people who vote in school board elections in the U.S. differ from the demographics of students attending local public schools. They examined a variety of data on voters who participated in school board elections between 2008 and 2016 and students who attended public schools during that period. The researchers focused on four states — California, Illinois, Ohio and Oklahoma — because they are large states with numerous school districts and higher percentages of students who are racial and ethnic minorities.

Because votes are confidential, the researchers predicted the race or ethnicity of each voter by combining census surname distributions with demographic information from the Census block where each voter lived. This is a common procedure for this type of research and has a 90% accuracy rate, the researchers note.

The findings: The study documents a “demographic disconnect.” Most people who voted in school board elections in these four states during this period likely didn’t have children enrolled in local public schools. The authors also note that voters and students differed in terms of race and ethnicity. In at least two-thirds of school districts where the majority of students were racial and ethnic minorities, the majority of voters were white, according to the researchers’ analysis.

The researchers also discovered that the gaps in student achievement separating white students and non-white students tended to be “larger in districts where the electorate looks most dissimilar from the student population.”

In the authors’ words: “If elected officials are motivated to respond to voter preferences, our results suggest that school board members face the least political pressure to address persistent racial achievement gaps in precisely the districts where these gaps are largest because minority populations are most politically underrepresented in these jurisdictions.”

School Boards and Student Segregation
Hugh Macartney and John D. Singleton. Journal of Public Economics, August 2018.

The study: To better understand the role school boards play in student segregation, the researchers matched data on school board members in 105 North Carolina school districts with data on student enrollment patterns in those districts from 2008 to 2012. The researchers looked at whether student enrollment at local elementary schools became more racially diverse after a Democrat joined the school board.

Intentionally segregating students by race is illegal in the U.S. In many parts of the country, public schools are racially segregated as the result of residential sorting, school attendance boundaries and other factors.

The researchers measured changes in race-based segregation in North Carolina by calculating what they call the “black dissimilarity index.” During the study period, 26% of students in North Carolina school district were Black, on average. Meanwhile, 63% of students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.”

The findings: When a Democrat was elected to a school board in North Carolina, racial segregation in local public schools fell. The Black dissimilarity index dropped about 8 percentage points across schools within the district, the researchers write, adding that a main way school boards reduce segregation is by adjusting public schools’ attendance boundaries. 

The researchers note this change typically occurs two years after an election, but is likely temporary. “In the long run, much of it may be undone by household re-sorting,” they write. The researchers found that some white students left their public schools when attendance boundaries shifted and moved to private schools or charter schools.

In the authors’ words: “Taken together, our findings underscore the central role that school boards play in allocating students to schools, with likely implications for the production of learning and social inequality more generally. Understanding how school boards may influence human capital accumulation is of key policy interest and an important direction for future work.”

Are School Boards and Educational Quality Related? Results of an International Literature Review
Marlies Honingha, Merel Ruiterband and Sandra van Thiel. Educational Review, 2020.

The study: Researchers reviewed 16 academic studies published between 1996 and 2016 to better understand the relationship between school boards and educational quality in different countries. The 16 studies look at how various aspects of school boards, including their composition and the behavior of school board members, affect student test scores in the public schools they govern. Twelve studies focus on U.S. school boards, two focus on school boards in the United Kingdom and two examine them in the Netherlands.

The findings: Differences in how school boards and school districts operate in different countries and regions make it difficult to draw any conclusions that would apply to school boards globally, the researchers write. Because several studies examine a single school district or rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, their results cannot be broadly applied. The researchers write that, based on the literature they reviewed, it’s unclear whether school board members have an impact on student achievement in their school districts.Whatever affect they do have is indirect, the researchers add.

The researchers stress the need for larger and more rigorous studies on this issue as well as the need to investigate school board impacts beyond student test scores.

In the authors’ words: “This article draws on a systematic literature review to show that there is a lack of solid empirical evidence on the relation between boards and educational quality. This means that we know less than is reflected in policy assumptions about school boards. The ambitions for school boards and the expectations upon them are not evidence-based.”

How Does Minority Political Representation Affect School District Administration and Student Outcomes?
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz. American Journal of Political Science, July 2021.

The study: The researchers investigate whether student achievement changes after racial and ethnic minorities are elected to local school boards. The researchers reconstructed the composition of local school boards between 2000 and 2014 using election data obtained from the California Election Data Archive. They collected data on public school districts and student test scores during that period from the California Department of Education.

The findings: After a racial or ethnic minority was elected to a school board in California, test scores rose among students who were racial or ethnic minorities. While the increase did not materialize until several years after the election and then gradually declined in magnitude, it was substantial.

“The largest estimated effect occurs five years after the election, when the estimated effect of a pivotal minority candidate victory is approximately 0.15 standard deviations,” the researchers write, adding that the change is roughly equivalent to an additional 46 days of learning.

The researchers could not determine the effect on white students’ scores. However, they found “no evidence that the improvements in non-white student performance come at the expense of white students.” They suggest gains in minority students’ test scores may have been driven in part by increased operational spending and changes in school administration that happened after the election of the minority school board member.

In the authors’ words: “We find little evidence that minority representation on school boards affects the total number of employees or the racial and ethnic composition of rank-and-file workers. Nor does school board composition appear to have a consistent effect on school-level segregation. We do, however, find evidence that the share of school district principals who are non-white increases when minorities win more school board seats, providing another potential policy lever through which changes in board composition may affect student learning.”

No Spending without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance
Brett Fischer. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2023.

The study: This paper, which also focuses on California school boards, looks at whether replacing a non-Hispanic school board member with a Hispanic board member results in greater spending on Hispanic students. The researcher examined capital spending specifically — how local school boards used grant money that they received from the state’s School Facility Program to fund projects such as campus renovations between 1999 and 2016.

The findings: After a non-Hispanic school board member was replaced with a Hispanic board member, California school boards invested more money in schools where the majority of students were Hispanic. The researcher’s analysis “indicates that a 20 percentage point increase in Hispanic board representation raises [School Facility Program] modernization spending by $93 per student (81 percent) among high-Hispanic schools within the district.” Schools with relatively low Hispanic enrollment received an increase, too, although a smaller one. However, that increase was determined not to be statistically significant.

The analysis also suggests that after a Hispanic person joined a school board, that school district directed more construction funding to schools with a high percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school. There’s also evidence that having a Hispanic school board member is linked to improvements in teacher retention at “high-Hispanic” schools.

In the author’s words: “My analysis confirms that school boards play an integral role in education finance. Using spending data from the [School Facility Program], I find that an additional minority (Hispanic) school board member increases spending on school renovations using state transfer grants. In particular, SFP spending on high-Hispanic and high-poverty schools within the district increases by up to 69 percent, which juxtaposes smaller, insignificant changes among low-Hispanic and relatively affluent schools.”

Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A Reassessment
Michael T. Hartney. Chapter in Groups in U.S. Local Politics, September 2023.

The study: The researcher examines the impact that teacher-union endorsements have on school board elections in California and Florida. The researcher chose to study California because it’s a large, racially diverse state where unions representing government employees are especially powerful, he writes. He chose Florida, another large, racially diverse state, because labor law there has historically been less favorable to teacher unions.

He analyzed union endorsements given to 3,336 school board candidates across 468 school districts in California between 1995 and 2020. He also analyzed endorsements of 361 school board candidates running for office in 36 Florida school districts between 2010 and 2020.

The findings: In both states, school board candidates backed by local teacher unions did “exceptionally well” in most elections. In California, about 90% of union-backed incumbents were reelected and two-thirds of union-backed candidates running against an incumbent won their races. Meanwhile in Florida, about 80% of incumbents endorsed by teacher unions won reelection and more than half of candidates who challenged an incumbent and had union endorsements prevailed.

In the author’s words: “I have shown, quite simply, that union power in school board elections remains both robust and resilient. Irrespective of the very real setbacks that unions have faced in state and national politics, in the local trenches of school board electioneering, the data tell an unambiguous story: teacher-union interest groups remain an important player, they are still the ones to beat.”

Additional resources

• In “Outside money targets school board elections,” we examine research on how wealthy individuals and national advocacy groups have used their money to influence local school board elections.
• The National School Boards Association offers various national reports on school boards. Organizations such as the Illinois Association of School Boards and Texas Association of School Boards provide state-level data and reports.
• We created a tip sheet to help journalists understand and cover teacher unions, including their influence on local school boards.
• This article warns journalists about the dangers of horse race coverage of elections — focusing on who’s in the lead and who’s behind instead of policy issues. It can harm political candidates, the public and news outlets themselves.
• Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona, offers eight tips to help journalists improve their overall coverage of U.S. elections.

The image above was obtained from the Flickr account of Joe Brusky and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Former Congressman Tip O’Neill famously said “all politics is local.”

The same applies to election administration in the U.S., which is markedly decentralized. On Election Day, county- and city-level poll workers are the people who make sure voters can smoothly cast their ballots for measures and candidates vying for offices spanning all levels of government.

But this fundamental democratic function isn’t free, and election administrators often say they have a lot to do on limited budgets, research shows. State and local governments — not the federal government — are usually responsible for election administration costs.

Some of the biggest ongoing costs are related to statewide voter registration rolls, which can cost millions of dollars a year to build and maintain, according to to a 2022 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart III.

Costs associated with individual elections include staffing, supplies for polling places and postage for mail-in ballots. Local election agencies have to pay for return postage in 19 states, plus Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Postal Service will typically deliver any ballot that lacks enough postage, billing the appropriate election agency later, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Longer-term costs include upgrading equipment such as scanners that process paper ballots.

Nearly 80% of voters used paper-and-scanner technology during the 2020 election. Most of the remaining voters used direct-recording electronic machines. With those devices, voters use touch screens or push buttons to record their votes digitally, which may or may not include a paper trail.

Nationally, equipment costs would run $100 million to $300 million yearly if each scanner were replaced at the end of its useful life, around ten years, according to the MIT report. As of 2022, the voting equipment used in 24 states was over a decade old, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“Election officials are used to ‘making do’ with what they have,” Stewart writes. “They often express pride in pulling off the complicated logistical maneuvers necessary to conduct elections on a shoestring budget.”

Revenue from sales and property taxes are one major source of funding for elections, according to the 2022 MIT report. While federal grants have sporadically been available since 2002, “there is no ongoing federal mechanism for funding the general expenses of administering elections,” according to a September 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

The question of who pays to run elections gained national news attention during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, for example, sudden additional costs related to widespread mail-in voting and personal protective equipment for election workers and volunteers.

And there’s not solely government money involved.

For the 2020 election cycle, “private individuals funded grant programs for state and local election administration that were particularly notable in their scale and sources,” according to the CRS report.

Philanthropist Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Meta, were the leading donors, committing up to $419.5 million for election administration, including for personal protective equipment.

That commitment was roughly 20% of one estimate of the typical cost of administering elections across the U.S. and about half the $825 million Congress appropriated for state and local election administration in 2020. (That federal appropriation was atypically large due to the pandemic-era challenges — by comparison, Congress appropriated nothing for state and local elections during the 2016 cycle, according to the CRS report.)

A raft of misinformation about the Chan-Zuckerberg funding followed President Joe Biden’s November 2020 win over former President Donald Trump. At the same time, Republican state legislators and conservative groups pushed to remove private dollars from election administration.

There are now 28 states that limit, regulate or prohibit private or charitable funding for elections, according to the NCSL. In 2020, the electoral votes from 22 of those states went to Trump while five went to Biden. Nebraska, which allocates its electoral votes differently from nearly every other state and often splits its electoral votes, sent one to Biden and four to Trump in 2020.

All legislation related to private funding of elections has been passed since 2020, according to the NCSL.

With the new legislation and a variety of election financing systems across the country, it can be confusing to know where to begin to help audiences understand how their elections are funded. These research-based tips will give you a solid base for reporting on election administration funding in your coverage area.

1. Get to know state rules on how localities can finance elections.

Start with this list, compiled by the NCSL, of states that have passed laws about private funding of elections. Note whether your state prohibits all private funding, or limits such funding in some cases.

Alabama, for example, prohibits state and local election officials from soliciting or accepting “any donation in the form of money, grants, property, or personal services from an individual or a nongovernmental entity for the purpose of funding election-related expenses or voter education, voter outreach, or voter registration programs.”

But Alabama election officials can accept a donation of physical space for voting provided by private entities, such as a brick-and-mortar business donating its store for use as a polling place. If there is a state public health emergency, election officials in that state can accept “the donation of items for the preservation or protection of the public health.”

In South Carolina, by contrast, state and county election agencies cannot accept “gifts, donations, or funding from private individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, or any third party not provided through ordinary state or county appropriations,” without exceptions. And in Texas, local election officials cannot accept financial contributions over $1,000 without written notice from the secretary of state, who must first obtain unanimous approval from key state leaders, including the governor.

2. Ask election officials if they have enough funding. If not, how much do they need and for what?

Legal scholars have described adequate election funding as a fundamental pillar of the right to vote. “Unlike most other rights, the right to vote relies on governments to build, fund, and administer elections systems,” write law professors Joshua Sellers and Justin Weinstein-Tull in a 2021 New York University Law Review article. “This obligation is not ancillary to the right to vote; it is foundational to it.”

Ask local election officials if they have enough funding for 2024. If not, how much do they think they need and what specific outcomes would additional funding help achieve? What tradeoffs would there be — would more funding for elections mean less funding for other needs?

While election administrators will likely say they would gladly take more funding, there is scant research that provides points of comparison to assess outcomes of increased funding — for example, whether election agencies serving similar constituencies do their jobs differently depending on funding levels.

3. Don’t assume localities with high tax revenues spend more on election administration.

Recent research has focused on parsing the local costs of elections. In a 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review article, Sellers and law professor Roger Michalski seek to correct what they call the “shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost.”

Sellers and Michalski use a “novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset,” on election costs at the local and state levels from 2010 to 2017 across four states that make up nearly one-third of the national population: California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Part of the challenge in analyzing election spending data across and within states is that agencies record their election-related expenses differently. The authors found that some agencies provide detailed expenditures down to the cost of postage, while others more broadly record costs.

They do not find connections between election funding and demographic factors such as race, poverty and educational attainment.

“Election spending in majority-minority communities seems largely indistinguishable from spending in predominantly white communities,” Sellers and Michalski write. “In short, basic assumptions one might have about resource allocation are brought into question.”

Sellers and Michalski also estimate that election spending in the four states is typically in the range of $4.50 to $8.50 per capita. This is in line with other research, including a 2018 data collection project on elections held in more than half of states from 2009 to 2016, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That research estimates an average U.S. cost per voter of $8 per election, but substantial variation across states, with costs as high as $15 per voter in Florida and as low as $2 per voter in Michigan.

Sellers and Michalski also find wide variation in election spending. For example, in California many cities “spend less than a dollar per person per year on election expenditures, while others spend many multiples more,” they write. Those findings hold for the other states in the study, and, generally, wealthier cities do not necessarily spend more per capita to administer elections than cities with lower tax revenues.

Spending tends to be higher in areas where governments overlap: “In many places, municipalities and counties work in concert to organize, run, and fund elections,” Sellers and Michalski write.

Election administration spending can vary even within counties. Someone living in a large city that is part of a county with sprawling suburbs might take part in elections funded at both the city and county levels, while a suburban voter might only have elections funded by the county.

4. Explain why election administration funding matters.

One big reason funding matters: Election officials need to be able to purchase technology and ballot designs that accurately records voters’ choices.

For example, the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was notably affected by punch card ballots, with so-called “hanging chads” making voter intentions unclear and directly leading to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which provided federal funding to upgrade local voting systems.

Scholars who study elections use something called the residual vote rate to measure the relative ability of election agencies to perform their fundamental task of recording voter intentions. As Stewart writes in a 2018 MIT Election Lab blog post, “the number of residual votes is usually calculated by taking the number of people who turned out and subtracting the number of votes cast for candidates.”

In other words, a residual vote is when a ballot is cast that includes votes for some but not all races on the ballot. The authors of a 2020 paper in the Public Administration Review explore residual vote rates in North Carolina by dividing the number of ballots cast in presidential election years from 1996 to 2012 by the number of votes for president.

Presidential ballots often also include races for local or state offices, and ballot measures. For example, a residual vote would be counted when a ballot includes a vote for a senate race and a ballot measure, but is missing a vote for president.

“Though some proportion of residual votes might be the choice of the voter (some people choose not to vote for particular offices), scholarship revealed that residual votes were systematically related to the type of voting equipment and ballot design,” the authors write.

Sufficient funding generally allows people running and working for organizations to develop expertise and “provide for better technology and assistance,” the authors write, citing past research. The authors further explain in the paper that “the residual vote rate is an important managerial outcome of election administration.”

Although the authors analyze only one state, they note that, over time, they are able to explore residual voting in the same local administration organizations, which differ in their ability to run elections but have the same funding mechanisms.

“We find that both managerial capacity and better technology significantly reduce the residual vote rate as would be predicted by theory and literature,” the authors conclude.

5. Know that the health of the U.S. economy may affect election administration spending.

Research has found that how the broader economy is doing can affect spending on election administration.

A 2020 paper in American Politics Research examines county-level spending on elections from 2005 to 2016 in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio. This timeframe overlapped with the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and ended in mid-2009. The authors note they chose those states based primarily on the availability of detailed financial data for county election offices.

During and after the recession, election-related spending in these states fell sharply, and stayed lower than before the recession, even as the economy slowly began to recover.

“Unfortunately, just because democracy may need significant funds to conduct an election, it does not always mean that election administrators have sufficient resources,” the authors conclude.

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At first glance, registering to vote in the U.S. may seem easy: Adults fill out a form and submit it online, in person or through the mail. But getting onto a state’s voter roll — and staying there — can be complicated. It’s also a key reason more Americans don’t participate in elections. 

All states except North Dakota require voter registration for federal, state and local elections. The U.S., unlike many other democratic nations, puts the burden of registration on its citizens.

In India, the world’s largest democracy, the government creates voter rolls automatically from census data, according to a 2020 report from the Pew Research Center. America’s neighbor to the north, Canada, maintains a national database of registered voters who are added automatically based on data collected across government agencies there, including birth and death records and income tax filings.

Pew notes that half of the 226 countries and territories included in the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network have some type of registration mandate. The network, launched at the United Nations in 1998, is a global repository of election-related information.

In 2022, 69% of U.S. citizens aged 18 years and older were registered to vote, according to a report the U.S. Census Bureau released last year. Registration rates ranged from 61% in North Carolina to 83% in Oregon.

The four most populous states — California, Texas, Florida and New York — had some of the lowest registration rates: 67%, 65%, 63% and 66%, respectively.

U.S. election oversight

U.S. elections are broadly governed by federal laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. All three aimed to broaden the number of people participating in American elections.

The National Voter Registration Act significantly expanded residents’ opportunities to register to vote. It’s commonly referred to as the “Motor Voter Act” because it requires states to allow residents to register to vote at the same time they apply for or renew their driver’s licenses. The law also mandates that residents be able to register at certain state and local offices, including public assistance offices.

There’s no national list of registered voters or people eligible to vote, however. Individual states and the District of Columbia maintain their own voter rolls. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia share data through the Electronic Registration Information Center to help one another keep track of voters who move or die and prevent duplicate registrations.

Federal law forbids people who are not U.S. citizens from voting in federal elections, but states decide who can participate in state and local elections. While all states prohibit non-citizens from voting in state elections, a few cities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, according to Ballotpedia.

Why voter registration rates differ

A big reason voter registration rates differ so much is because each state has its own election policies and processes, which can make registering easy or difficult. In addition, local election offices vary in how they interpret those rules, how they educate and engage with residents, and how they maintain their voter lists.

To complete this first part of the voting process, U.S. citizens must:

• Make sure they are eligible to register. Adults living in the U.S. can register to vote in federal, state and local elections if they are U.S. citizens and meet their state’s residency requirements. Although citizens cannot vote until they are 18 years old, many states allow them to register starting at age 16. Some states prohibit certain groups from voting, including people who have been convicted of a felony and adults with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities.
• Determine where, when and how to register. In most states, residents can register online any time, provided they have access to the internet, can locate the registration form for their state online and can fill out a digital document. Those who cannot or do not want to register online can do it by mail or visit a local election office in person during its business hours.
• Correctly complete a voter registration application. Lots of people make mistakes or leave out key information on their applications. Applicants in the three states that require them to answer a question about their race or ethnicity might skip it if they aren’t sure what to write. Occasionally, applicants get their birthdates, driver’s license numbers or other identification numbers wrong.
• Submit it before their state’s deadline. Voter registration deadlines vary. In Texas, for example, citizens must be registered at least 30 days before Election Day. In Alabama, they must be registered 15 days prior. It’s 10 days in New York. In 22 other states and the capital, citizens can register to vote and cast ballots on the same day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
• Promptly fix any errors or provide missing information. Local election officials review voter registration applications and notify people needing to correct an error or provide additional information. If applicants don’t share their phone numbers on their registration application, election officials will reach out by mail. If issues are not resolved by the voter registration deadline, the applicant will not be added to the voter roll in time for their ballots to count.
• Check on their voter registration status. After registering to vote, it’s a good idea for residents to periodically check their registration status. Election offices remove people from the voter rolls for various reasons, which also differ by state. Officials in Massachusetts, for instance, can remove residents who don’t participate in city and town censuses. States can cancel the registrations of residents deemed to be “inactive voters” — a term defined differently across states. Voters in Wyoming can have their registrations canceled after not voting in one general election.

Each step can be a stumbling block that ultimately results in someone not being able to register, political scientists Christopher B. Mann of Skidmore College and Lisa A. Bryant of California State University Fresno write in a 2020 paper, published in the journal Electoral Studies.

“It is a cliché that ‘getting to the starting line’ is often more difficult than running the race, and this sentiment seems applicable for many American citizens when it comes to voting: The requirement to register is a costly and time-consuming obstacle to casting a ballot,” Mann and Bryant write.

Voter registration rates among demographic groups

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates substantial disparities in voter registration rates across states and the District of Columbia. The Census Bureau provides a variety of reports and spreadsheets containing estimates of the number and percentage of people from each state who are registered to vote. It offers data broken down age, sex, race, household income, employment status and other demographic factors.

White U.S. citizens are much more likely to be registered to vote than citizens of other racial and ethnic groups. Nationally, about 71% of white adult citizens, 64% of Black adult citizens, 60% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Some other disparities:

• Older adult citizens are more likely to be registered than younger ones. While 77% of citizens aged 65 years and older were registered to vote in November 2022, 63% of citizens aged 25 to 34 and 49% of citizens aged 18 to 24 were.
• Voter registration rates differed by job status in November 2022. For example, 60% of unemployed adult citizens reporting being registered compared with 72% of self-employed adult citizens and 79% with government jobs.
• Adult citizens with lower incomes are less likely to register to vote than those with higher incomes. For example, 83% of adult citizens with family incomes of $150,000 per year or higher were registered to vote in November 2022. Meanwhile, 58% of adult citizens with family incomes of $15,000 to $19,999 were.

KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, used Census Bureau data to create an interactive database that lets the public search and sort voter registration rates by race and ethnicity in even-numbered years from November 2014 to November 2022. It shows stark differences across racial groups in certain parts of the country.

A few examples:

• The voter registration rate among Hispanic adult citizens in November 2022 was lowest in Mississippi, at 23%, and highest in Minnesota, at 75%.
• In Iowa, 76% of white adult citizens were registered to vote, compared with 41% of Black adult citizens, 45% of Asian adult citizens and 58% of Hispanic adult citizens.
• In 10 states, fewer than half of Black adult citizens were registered to vote in November 2022. In 15 states, fewer than half of Asian adult citizens were.

A look at academic research

Scholars have documented problems with the voter registration process across the U.S. for decades. In recent years, they have focused on voter education and outreach as well as voter list maintenance, a process of updating the rolls of registered voters that includes removing people who have died, moved to other states or lost their eligibility to vote.

Researchers stress that registration rates would be higher if citizens understood the rules around voter registration and the consequences of not following them. However, the quality of voter education programs varies from state to state and even from election office to election office, studies conducted by Thessalia Merivaki, an associate professor in American politics at Mississippi State University, have found.

Merivaki is among a small group of researchers who study voter registration, education and outreach. Several of her most recent studies focus on Florida, probably in part because the state’s broad open records laws make it much easier to obtain data and reports there than in many other states. Two chapters of Merivaki’s 2021 book, “The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States,” also focus exclusively on Florida election administration.

When Merivaki and her colleague, Mara Suttmann-Lea, an assistant professor of American politics at Connecticut College, studied the education and outreach efforts of Florida’s 67 county election offices, they learned they varied considerably. Those offices “enjoy significant discretion in how they engage in voter education and the resources they dedicate to these efforts,” the two researchers write in a 2022 paper published in Policy Studies.

When Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea studied states’ efforts to improve voter education after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, they discovered some states did more than others. In fact, they found that some states’ improvement plans probably did not comply with the federal law, created in the wake of the controversial presidential election results in Florida in 2000. The legislation provided $3.9 billion to help states modernize their election equipment and processes.

Some states did not incorporate the federal law’s “core voter education provisions, particularly voting technology demonstrations, voter guides, and toll-free hotlines” in their plans for improving voter education, Merivaki and Suttmann-Lea write in a 2022 analysis in the Election Law Journal. They also note “differences in the inclusion of education materials for language minority and disabled voters, suggesting limits on compliance with existing federal laws.”

Once citizens are added to the voter rolls, they can be removed, though. Election researchers have raised questions about the effectiveness and lawfulness of states’ procedures for maintaining voter lists.

List maintenance is meant to protect against fraud and help election officials estimate the number of voting machines, ballots, poll workers and polling locations they will need on Election Day. But that process also is flawed. It can remove eligible voters en masse and with little notice.

Some residents do not realize they have been taken off the voter roll until they show up at their polling place on Election Day. As a result, some Americans who are eligible to vote either don’t vote or vote using a provisional ballot, which is kept apart from regular ballots until election officers determine whether the individual who filled it out is eligible to vote.

Recent academic research also indicates:

• Local election offices vary in the way they process voter registration applications, which seems to contribute to big differences in the percentage of applications each office rejects. When researchers studied the issue in Florida, they found that rejection rates also varied seasonally, with fewer applications being rejected in October — the cut-off there for applying to register to vote in November elections.
• In Florida, younger voters and racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to have their voter registration applications put “on hold,” meaning they needed to correct errors and provide additional information before their applications can be processed.
• Compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act has been “spotty and variable over time and across states.”
• Some states have started automatically prompting residents to register to vote when they visit a government office. While voter registration has risen in these states, the registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans appear unchanged.

We elaborate on these findings below. We have summarized four peer-reviewed papers and a report from the University of Southern California that investigate these issues. We plan to update this article occasionally as new studies and data become available.

Research roundup

Voter registration challenges

Registered, But Not Quite: Processing Pending and Incomplete Registrations
Thessalia Merivaki. Chapter 6 of The Administration of Voter Registration: Expanding the Electorate Across and Within the States, 2021.

The study: In this book chapter, Merivaki examines records from two county election offices in Florida to better understand why some voter registration applications are placed “on hold” and which individuals are more likely to have their applications put in this category. She compares records from 2016 from Pinellas and Polk counties, which are located in the same region of Florida and have populations of similar size.

Between Jan. 1, 2016 and Oct. 18, 2016, a total of 2,132 applications in Polk County and 3,892 in Pinellas County were placed “on hold,” meaning they were either incomplete or denied. The deadline to register to vote in the general election that year in that state was Oct. 18.

The findings: The most common reason applications were placed on hold was because of a missing or incorrect identification number such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of the applicant’s social security number, Merivaki found. In Polk County, 55% of “on hold” registrations were deemed incomplete because of this. In Pinellas County, 31% were. The most common reason for being denied: Having a felony conviction.

Merivaki learned that individuals with “on hold” applications “were overall young, racially diverse, predominantly registering as NPAs [not having a political party affiliation] or Democrats, and slightly more male than female,” she writes. However, Black applicants were much less likely than white applicants to be placed on hold because of missing or incorrect identification information. Hispanic applicants, on the other hand, were much more likely than white, non-Hispanic applicants to be placed on hold for this reason.

Applicants who failed to disclose their race were 55% more likely to have their application put “on hold” because of missing or incorrect information than those who disclosed it.

In the author’s words: “While disclosing one’s gender and/or race is not required [in Florida] to register to vote, it offers an opportunity to assess whether undisclosed information affects the prospects of one’s application being classified as ‘incomplete’ or denied, after taking any other factors into consideration,” Merivaki writes.

Access Denied? Investigating Voter Registration Rejections in Florida
Thessalia Merivaki. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

The study: Merivaki examines monthly voter registration reports from each of Florida’s 67 county election offices to better understand the reasons why they rejected tens of thousands of voter registration applications between January and December 2012. Florida requires voters to be registered 29 days before a general election.

The findings: Election offices, on average, rejected about 11% of all registration applications submitted that year. But rejection rates varied by month and county. Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, had the highest monthly rejection rate — it rejected 56% of applications submitted in March 2012. Duval County’s rejection rate for the year averaged 15%, compared with about 11% in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, and 6% in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

Merivaki discovered that county election offices were least likely to reject applications in October 2012, when the rejection rate statewide averaged 3%. Oct. 9 was the deadline to register to vote in Florida’s November elections. She writes that the lower rejection rate in October suggests “administrative issues in processing voter registration applications when the volume of voter registration applications dramatically increases in a short period of time.”

She also discovered rejection rates were lower when a larger share of applications went through organizations such as public libraries and military recruitment offices. A 10% increase in voter registration applications submitted this way was associated with a 3% reduction in the rejection rate, she finds.

In the author’s words: “Given that the influx of voter registration applications peaks during the last weeks prior to the voter registration deadline, and so do the rates of rejected voter registrations, it appears that voter registration rejections stem from administrative challenges in processing applications in short time intervals,” Merivaki writes. “However, due to the fact the rates of rejected voter registrations also increase as early as eight months prior to the voter registration closing book date may have to do with the voters’ capacity to avoid errors when completing voter registration forms.”

Voter list maintenance issues

The Racial Burden of Voter List Maintenance Errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s Supplemental Movers Poll Books
Gregory A. Huber, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele. Science Advances, February 2021.

The study: This paper estimates how often voters in Wisconsin are incorrectly flagged as having moved to a new address, prompting the state to either remove them from its voter roll or start a process that can lead to their voter registration being cancelled. “It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote,” write the researchers, Gregory Huber of Yale University and Marc Meredith, Michael Morse and Katie Steele of the University of Pennsylvania.

When Wisconsin residents change the address on their driver’s license or file a change of address through the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address System, the Electronic Registration Information Center reports that information to Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Election Commission then sends postcards to people who are registered to vote asking them to confirm whether they have moved.

The findings: In October 2017, ERIC notified Wisconsin that 341,855 voters had potentially moved. Of those, 6,153 responded to the state’s postcard to confirm they remained eligible to vote at the address they had used to register. The remaining 335,702 voters were initially removed from the state voter roll.

Huber and his colleagues estimate that 4% of voters who had been flagged as suspected movers and did not respond to postcards voted in 2018 and still lived at the same address they used to register. This represents at least 9,000 people. Racial and ethnic minorities were about 4 percentage points more likely than white residents to vote at the address that ERIC had flagged as being out of date.

In the authors’ words: “Our results show why it is essential to make registrants aware if their registration is being moved to inactive status and to continue to alert these registrants to upcoming elections so that they know when and where to vote if they still reside at their address of registration.”

Complying with federal election law

Race, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Voting Rights
Jamila Michener, Poverty and Public Policy, June 2016.

The study: Jamila Michener of Cornell University examines the reasons states vary in their compliance with Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993, which requires public assistance agencies to offer voter registration services to everyone applying for or renewing their government benefits. She looks at changes in compliance between 1995 and 2012.

The findings: Compliance with the federal law was higher when the president was a Democrat and lower when legislatures were more heavily Republican. Race played a key role in determining whether states worked to bring people with lower incomes into the election process, Michener finds.

She also finds that compliance was lower in states where a larger percentage of the population was Black. Meanwhile, she adds, that “[h]igher percentages of Black bureaucrats are associated with increased compliance while growing ranks of Latinos in state welfare bureaucracies are associated with decreases in compliance.” Michener explains that she is unsure why compliance falls under Latino leadership. But she notes that Latino bureaucrats “are likely better educated and more economically advantaged than other Latinos,” which she adds “can translate into less liberal attitudes, less of a sense of linked fate, and an increased desire to disassociate oneself from more marginal co-ethnics.”

In the author’s words: “These findings raise concerns about the political equality of disadvantaged citizens and underscore the need to scrutinize the outcomes of expansionary voting policies. Even more broadly, this research shows how the entanglement of race and poverty in a federalist polity frustrates efforts to advance participatory equality.”

Automatic voter registration

Effects of Automatic Voter Registration in the United States
Eric McGhee and Mindy Romero. Report from the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California, 2020.

The study: This report looks at how introducing automatic voter registration affected registration rates in 11 states. In most of those states, eligible residents were automatically registered to vote based on information they provided their state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, unless they actively declined. The authors, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Mindy Romero of the University of Southern California, note the report’s conclusions “are not firm” because Americans nationwide had reduced access to government agencies at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings: While voter registration rose after states implemented AVR initiatives — starting with Oregon in 2016 — the researchers are unsure how much of the increase is a direct result of AVR. In Oregon, for example, 722,823 people who had not previously been registered were added to the state’s voter roll between January 2016 and January 2020. Another 1.2 million Oregonians already registered to vote updated their addresses.

McGhee and Romero note there is evidence, from Oregon and California in particular, that AVR “adds new registrants consistently throughout the election cycle in a way that could have lasting effects on the state’s overall registration rate.” However, AVR does not appear to improve the relative registration rates of underrepresented groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans.

In the authors’ words: “The data suggest the reform probably encourages some new people to register who would not have done so without AVR. However, the effect on overall registration is ambiguous because most AVR increases we estimate are small and the reform is still relatively new.”

The post How voter registration rules discourage some Americans from voting: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

U.S. citizens ages 18 and older who are registered to vote can cast ballots in local, state and federal elections. But states, which conduct and administer many elections, including federal elections, can also take away individuals’ right to vote for certain reasons.

A felony conviction, either in state or federal court, is one common way people lose the right to vote in the U.S. This process is commonly referred to as felony disenfranchisement. Because laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state, there are a range of outcomes when it comes to the voting rights of those convicted of felonies. While nearly every state curtails voting for people convicted of felonies while they are incarcerated, not every felony conviction results in prison time.

Convictions can result from jury trials or plea deals, and the vast majority of criminal convictions in the U.S. are obtained by guilty plea, according to a 2023 report from the American Bar Association. Most people in jail for misdemeanor offenses or while awaiting court hearings can vote, but they face challenges, such as a lack of opportunities to register, according to reporting from Matt Vasilogambros of Stateline, a nonprofit news organization.

Felony disenfranchisement laws by state

“In 11 states, felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes, or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored,” according to research from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

• Those 11 strictest states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the NCSL. Florida “disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state,” write the authors of a January 2023 paper in the Vanderbilt Law Review.
• There are 14 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote while incarcerated, as well as while completing probation or parole, according to the NCSL. These states are Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
• There are 23 states where people convicted of felonies lose the right to vote only while incarcerated, according to the NCSL, with the right automatically reinstated after time served. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington.       
• People convicted of felonies in the District of Columbia, Maine and Vermont do not lose their voting rights and can vote while incarcerated.
• In some states, people convicted of a felony can vote in the state where they live even if they wouldn’t be eligible in the state where they were convicted. Journalists covering this topic should consult legislation and reach out to legal experts to understand their state rules for restoring voting rights. For a quick look at restoring voting rights for people with criminal convictions, check this U.S. Department of Justice state-by-state guide.

Brief historical context of felony disenfranchisement

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are barred from voting because of a felony conviction, according to estimates from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “effective and humane responses to crime.” News outlets commonly cite reports and policy briefs from The Sentencing Project, and their data is used in academic research, including in one of the papers featured below.

Over the past quarter century, about half of state legislatures have moved to restore voting rights to those disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

“Since 1997, 26 states and the District of Columbia have expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions,” according to an October 2023 report from The Sentencing Project. “As a result, over 2 million Americans have regained the right to vote.”

State felony disenfranchisement laws arose during the post-Civil War era, when the Reconstruction Act of 1867 affirmed universal suffrage for all men.

“At that point, two interconnected trends combined to make disenfranchisement a major obstacle for newly enfranchised Black voters,” according to a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “First, lawmakers — especially in the South — implemented a slew of criminal laws designed to target Black citizens. And nearly simultaneously, many states enacted broad disenfranchisement laws that revoked voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony.”

Mississippi is something of an outlier among the strictest states in that people convicted of felonies in federal court do not lose voting rights there, but people convicted of felonies in state courts for a range of crimes do lose the right to vote, according to the U.S. Department of Justice guide on voting rights for people with criminal convictions. The right to vote in Mississippi can only be restored by pardon or legislative action, according to the guide.

Rules for restoring voting rights in states that allow it can also vary. Even if the right is “automatically” reinstated, often individuals must still proactively re-register to vote, according to the NCSL.

Below, we have gathered and summarized six studies that explore demographic trends in felony disenfranchisement as well as how felony disenfranchisement affects political engagement and electoral democracy in U.S. states. The research roundup is followed by story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show …

• Public health outcomes tend to be worse in states where democratic processes are affected by policies such as felony disenfranchisement.
• People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia and when they support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs.
• Felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher where Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms.
• Restoring voting rights to people convicted of felonies is unlikely to meaningfully affect election results — but those who have their voting rights restored tend to feel they personally have more of a say in how their state governments operate.

Research roundup

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality
Jennifer Karas Montez, Kent Jason Cheng and Jacob Grumbach. The Milbank Quarterly, May 2023.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between the democratic health of a state and the physical health of people aged 25 to 64 in that state. They use the State Democracy Index, which measures the health of each state’s democratic processes based on 51 indicators, such as felony disenfranchisement, the availability of absentee voting and voter registration requirements. (The index was developed by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.) The authors of the paper also use mortality rates for working-age people from the National Center for Health Statistics.

The findings: Working-age mortality and electoral democratic health are strongly associated, the authors find. States that improve their electoral democracy rating from “moderate” to “high” could see their working-age mortality rates fall 3.2% for men and 2.7% for women, according to estimates from statistical models the authors developed. The authors further estimate that state improvements to electoral democracy are associated with lower drug poisoning deaths for men and women, along with deaths from infectious diseases and homicides.

In the authors’ words: “According to historians … real improvements in population health in the mid- to late 1800s in industrializing countries such as England came about largely because of increased voting power of the public and, partly as a consequence, the rise of government interventions such as sanitation and clean water systems to improve social conditions for everyone. The historical association between rising democratic functioning and declining mortality is the flip side of today’s association between declining democratic functioning and rising mortality.”

Exclusionary Citizenship: Public Punitiveness and Support for Voting Restrictions
Cecilia Chouhy, Peter Lehmann and Alexa Singer. Justice Quarterly, August 2022.

The study: The authors explore links between individual support for “anti-welfarism, anti-immigrant attitudes and symbolic racism,” and support for disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. Symbolic racism refers to “an apathy toward racial inequalities and a rejection of efforts to mitigate them,” the authors write. Specifically, the authors analyze results from 7,453 adults who took the 2020 American National Election Survey, a public opinion poll conducted during the weeks before and after presidential elections, operated by collaboration of several major universities.

The findings: People are more likely to support felony disenfranchisement when they express attitudes aligned with xenophobia or symbolic racism. They also tend to support policies that would restrict immigration and reduce government funding for public programs such as social security, education and aid to people with low incomes.

Support for the death penalty, likewise, is associated with support for felony disenfranchisement, the authors find. This association is strongest among Republicans, compared with Democrats. Among Democrats, attitudes aligned with symbolic racism are more likely to lead to support for felony disenfranchisement, compared with Republicans and independents.

In the authors’ words: “Our findings suggest that racial animosities, as well as xenophobia and support for immigration restrictions, not only are correlated with attitudes favoring punitive criminal justice policies but also explain differences in public support for punitive and non-punitive forms of voting restrictions.”

Sick And Tired of Being Excluded: Structural Racism in Disenfranchisement As A Threat To Population Health Equity
Patricia Homan and Tyson Brown. Health Affairs, February 2022.

The study: Does felony disenfranchisement affect health during middle and later life? The authors seek to shed light on this question. They use data from The Sentencing Project and the U.S. Census Bureau to assess whether Black people in each state are over- or under-represented among those disenfranchised due to felony convictions. Then, they compare that information with results from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan, a nationally representative survey of adults over age 51 that is “the most widely used dataset for studying health and well-being in later life,” the authors write. The datasets are from 2016, the most recent available.

“This study focused on Black and White people because they have the highest and lowest rates of disenfranchisement, respectively,” the authors explain in the paper. The final analysis excludes 15 states that have relatively small populations of Black people. The 35 states included account for 92% of the U.S. white population and 99% of the Black population, the authors write.

The findings: During the year studied, Black people were proportionally disenfranchised at a higher rate than white people in all 35 states, but particularly in states in the North, Mountain West and West. States in the South tended to have lower rates of proportional Black disenfranchisement. The authors find that felony disenfranchisement is relatively higher in states where older Black populations also exhibit higher rates of depressive symptoms and difficulty performing everyday tasks, such as using a telephone, shopping, bathing, dressing and getting in and out of bed. There was no association found between disenfranchisement among Black people and these health outcomes among white people.

In the authors’ words: “Consistent with the growing recognition that social policies are health policies, enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

How Often do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Ariel White and Avery Nguyen. The Journal of Politics, January 2022.

The study: The authors begin with data from the 2018 elections across 17 states that disenfranchise people while they are incarcerated for felony offenses and explore what the turnout rates would have to have been for those individuals to swing elections if they were granted the right to vote while incarcerated. The highest was Massachusetts, where the closest race in 2018 was decided by 654,161 votes — if the 8,870 people in that state who were disenfranchised due to felony incarcerations had been able to vote, they would have had to vote at a rate of 8,090%, an impossibility, and all would have had to have voted against the winning candidate. The lowest was Nevada, where those incarcerated for felonies would have had to vote at a rate of 36%, and all against the winning candidate, to swing the closest election held there that year.

The authors note that “studies of people who have regained their right to vote after incarceration find that they participate at much lower rates than other votes,” and then turn to whether the question of whether people incarcerated for felonies vote in the two states, Maine and Vermont, where they are never disenfranchised. They use prison records and state voter files to explore this question.

The findings: About one-in-three people serving time in Vermont for felony crimes were registered to vote during the 2018 election, while 8% of all people incarcerated for felonies voted. Similarly, in Maine, about one-third of those incarcerated for felony crimes were registered in 2018, while around 6% of people incarcerated for felonies cast ballots.

In the authors’ words: “This conclusion — that from-prison voter turnout is low even in Vermont and Maine and would be unlikely to affect state elections elsewhere — does not imply that we think states should avoid such policies. Rather, we suggest that policy makers should consider moral arguments rather than casual predictions about how these laws might change elections. People have made moral claims both for and against re-enfranchising people with felony convictions, highlighting ideas about paying one’s debt to society, the racist history of disfranchisement laws, and the meaning of citizenship. Our findings suggest that such normative debates are at least as relevant as the possibility of imprisoned voters changing election outcomes.”

Neighborhoods and Felony Disenfranchisement: The Case of New York City
Kevin Morris. Urban Affairs Review, September 2021.

The study: Morris explores whether voter turnout rates by neighborhood during the 2017 New York City mayoral election are linked to the proportion of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, by neighborhood. In particular, Morris identifies “lost voters,” which he defines as people with a history of voting before their disenfranchisement due to felony conviction. The data Morris analyzes includes felony incarceration and parole records since 1990, which he obtained via public records request from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Morris also uses a snapshot of publicly available, statewide voter data from April 2018, which includes whether individuals voted in the past as well as those who lost eligibility and were removed from the active voter file. He identifies 2,518 “lost voters” during the 2017 election.

The findings: Neighborhoods with lost voters also had lower average turnout rates in the 2017 election than the overall average neighborhood. In addition, neighborhoods without a lost voter during the 2016 general election that then lost at least one voter by 2017 also had lower turnout rates.

Morris identifies clear demographic differences between neighborhoods with lost voters and those without. The median income for a neighborhood with lost voters was $47,806, on average, compared with $65,495 in the overall average neighborhood. The percentage of Black people in neighborhoods with lost voters was 41%, on average, compared with the overall average of 22%. The percentage of Latino people in neighborhoods with lost voters was also higher than the overall average — 36% to 29%. Registered Democrats made up 77% of the electorate in neighborhoods with lost voters, on average, compared with an overall average of 68%.

In the author’s words: “Individuals who live in neighborhoods where police activity is relatively limited may interpret the incarceration of a neighbor as a largely individual phenomenon … In the neighborhoods where policing is most prevalent — often, lower-income Black communities — the incarceration of a neighbor might not be interpreted so individualistically. It may, rather, be interpreted as another reminder of the government’s unfairness. If a would-be voter finds herself soured on political participation because of her neighbor’s incarceration, she may be less likely to cast a ballot.”

Restoring Voting Rights: Evidence that Reversing Felony Disenfranchisement Increases Political Efficacy
Victoria Shineman. Policy Studies, December 2019.

The study: Shineman explores what happens to the political efficacy of people who have been convicted of felonies and disenfranchised after their right to vote is then restored or made eligible to be restored. Political efficacy refers to “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process,” according to foundational political science research from the mid-1950s.

Shineman conducted a survey of people with felony convictions eligible to have their voting rights restored, before and after the 2017 statewide elections in Virginia. In 2016, an executive gubernatorial order and subsequent court ruling allowed people convicted of felonies in Virginia to have their voting rights restored, one at a time, by executive order. By the 2017 election, more than 150,000 people had their right to vote restored, according to the paper.

Those who had their voting rights restored were notified by mail at their last known residence. But people convicted of felonies are “a particularly transient population,” Shineman writes, meaning many of those now able to vote did not know it.

Shineman convened a panel of 98 people convicted of felonies, divided into three groups, to assess their political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle. The first group was told the state sought to restore voting rights to those convicted of felonies, and Shineman offered to look up their registration status. The second group received the same treatment, plus they were told about the upcoming election, how to register and where to vote. The third was a placebo group that was encouraged to engage in civic activity by volunteering in their neighborhoods, but not told that they could potentially register to vote, or about the election. Participants were surveyed about their feelings of political efficacy before and after the 2017 election cycle.

The findings: Among participants in the first two groups, about 21% learned from Shineman that their right to vote had been restored. Shineman notes that the sample size is small, which somewhat limits the strength of the results. With that caveat in mind, the treatment groups exhibited higher rates of political efficacy than the placebo group. For example, about 90% of people in those groups agreed with the statement “my vote makes a difference,” compared with 73% in the placebo group. Some 81% of participants in the treatment groups said they felt qualified to serve in a jury, compared with 76% of those in the placebo group. And 68% of the treatment participants said they “feel politically empowered,” compared with 57% of the placebo group.

In the author’s words: “Regardless as to whether citizens choose to exercise their voting rights, the act of restoring rights alone causes citizens to feel more empowered, more capable, and to be more likely to seek out opportunities for participatory engagement in the future.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• When telling the stories of people affected by felony disenfranchisement, including family members and community members, delve into the consequences of losing the right to vote. Try to move from abstract (“losing the right to vote”) to concrete effects, such as financial, physical health and mental health outcomes.
• If there are local conflicts between people advocating for and against felony disenfranchisement, use research to inform or question each side’s arguments.
• Use census data and information from organizations like The Sentencing Project to report local or statewide demographic differences in felony disenfranchisement. Who is the practice disproportionately affecting?

The post Felony disenfranchisement in the US: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

CBS News Prime Time Anchor John Dickerson, who has covered eight presidential candidates in his career as a political journalist, gave the Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics at Harvard Kennedy School on Feb. 5. He was introduced by his former colleague Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Dickerson and Gibbs worked together at Time magazine. The following is a lightly edited version of Dickerson’s speech, along with a video of the event.  

Hello everyone. It is a great honor to be with you all tonight for this maiden voyage of giving a speech using an iPad. If something goes wrong with the speech, it’s the technology’s fault.

You have been in my head the last month as I worked on this, which is a gift. I’m grateful for your attention and for the prompt to think more deeply about this topic.

Thank you, Nancy. I am here because of Nancy — not just because she invited me, but I am at this point in my career a beneficiary of her expertise. We worked together at Time, which, as I tell my college-age kids, is what’s known as a weekly news magazine.

You are lucky if, whatever your craft, you get to watch the best in your business at close range.

I was a reporter in the Time system, which meant I traveled with the [political] candidates and sent dispatches back to Nancy, who wrote what people would read. I’d send in a shaggy mutt from the road and she’d shave it down into some magnificent Weimaraner — scope, context, genius for detail, a compelling story. Most important, Nancy taught me the value of treating colleagues’ work with generosity, inspiring me to strive for the same standard.

At Time, we’d start stories with a theatrical lede to set the scene. Sometimes, writers would force the moment a little. Sweeping revelations came in scenic settings. Turning points hovered over evocative food: Candidate Clinton set down his Dunkin Donuts cup and set his jaw.

That kind of thing.

But I swear I am not torturing the facts when I say Nancy was there for the scene that I would make the theatrical lede of this talk.

In 2004, while in Crawford, Texas interviewing the incumbent President George W. Bush for Time. He was running against John Kerry. We stood in his driveway post-interview. Bush said when we interviewed John Kerry we should ask him how he makes decisions. “That’s all this job is about,” he said.

This struck me. Not that the presidency is about decisions. I’d covered the Bush White House and Clinton White House. What struck me was how little we talked about the actual job of being president when we covered campaigns. As a campaign reporter, I covered tactics, polling, battleground states. But not the job itself. Nancy thought about that stuff, but for me that moment with Bush in 2004 was a turning point.

So we’re going to start in that driveway tonight as I think through, with your help, how the press is helping the American people pick a person for a very specific job at a very dangerous time and how we can do better. And when I say “we” every time tonight about the press, I’m referring to myself as much as anyone.

I apologize if I talk too fast. But I don’t want to go on so long and be accused of what they used to say about Senator, Vice President and candidate Hubert Humphrey, who went on too long.

What follows a Humphrey dinner speech? Breakfast.

My argument is that our coverage of the presidential campaign is too distant from the office of the presidency.

At the moment, the horse race gets the attention — who is up and who is down — which makes my argument obtuse. With that in mind, I would like to give you a schema for my talk tonight:

Our first picture, please.

What you see here is a horse race. The man standing in the middle of it while it rages past him illustrates what it’s like to do this — try to pause the horse race and take an approach that keeps the duties of the presidency in mind.

However, we will soldier on.

First Principles

Let’s start with first principles.

What is our role covering presidential campaigns? To provide useful information to voters so they can make informed choices in picking the person who will affect their lives.

More briefly, presidential campaigns are a job interview.

The press conducts that interview on behalf of the voters. Sometimes as questioner. Sometimes by offering a window through which voters view the applicant. The glass in that window must be clear, as [author George] Orwell said, and we must pick the right frame through which people view the contest.

But our window is caked over and frame is askew due to three simultaneous shifts: changes in the presidency, changes in presidential campaigns and changes in the press.

The change in the presidency is that it has grown more complex. More duties. More scrutiny. And the other branch isn’t lending a hand. Less reliable Congress.

The change in campaigns is that they are worse at testing whether applicants are ready for that complexity. For two reasons: Political parties once tested candidates for governing skills but they’re weak and don’t provide that test anymore. Toxic partisanship has shrunk the hiring criteria for the majority of voters. Instead of [asking] “Is the person good for the job?” there is one criteria: Is the candidate in the right party to fight the enemy in the other party?”

The shift in media, spurred by pressure for attention, has led to a narrowing of the frame through which the campaign is presented to the public, compressing the complex into TikTok videos or content suitable for audiences addicted to them.

In this environment, it’s hard to slow the horses and talk about job qualifications.

The TV gambit

To flesh out these ideas and build a vocabulary for our talk, I’d like to go back to the past to illuminate the present.

A November 1959 TV Guide essay was entitled “A Force That Has Changed the Political Scene.” The author argues that nothing in modern politics “compares with the revolutionary impact of television.” It creates a new connection between the audience and the candidate: “Honesty, vigor, compassion, intelligence — the presence or lack of these and other qualities make up what is called the candidate’s ‘image.”

That image, he argues, reveals elemental truths about the presidential candidate to the viewer, leaving voters with impressions the author declared would be “uncannily correct.”

In that world, he argued, party leaders would not dare run rough-shod over the voters’ wishes by picking a candidate in the traditional smoke-filled room that would contradict millions of voters who had drawn a personal conclusion based on what they’d experienced.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the author of the piece was Sen. John F. Kennedy.

Two months after this essay, he announced his candidacy for the presidency.

The article he wrote was an effort by the upstart senator to make the wish the father of the thought — or rather, the punditry the father of the candidacy.

Kennedy elevated television to get around the party bosses who were going to pick someone else. To do this, he had to build a permission structure within the party to make it okay to support him. Television was his permission structure. By elevating the democratic value of the medium in which he excelled, he hoped to boost the value of his campaign, which people would learn about through that medium. If voters liked the fresh-faced Massachusetts fellow on TV, it meant they’d come to an “uncannily correct” view about his fitness for the presidency.

It would be as if I told you that only speeches made in green blazers bring knowledge you can believe in.

That gambit was connected with a structural strategy: Kennedy used party primaries to show his support in the land. Primaries weren’t the automatic route to the presidency they are today.

In 1952, Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver tried to sneak past the Democratic Party establishment by running in state primaries. He won 12 of 15 elections, but since delegates were chosen by bosses at state party conventions, the presidential nomination went to former Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, who hadn’t competed in a single primary.

The 1960 campaign that Teddy White became famous for covering super-charged two forces that have re-shaped the presidential landscape. It hastened the change of what was evaluated in candidates — increasingly the image was the thing — and because of Kennedy’s success in the primaries, it quickened the change of who did the evaluating — voters over party bosses.

What a story of change for the press to cover! But those two forces would also pull presidential campaigns out of balance.

The argument is not that image is newly powerful in presidential campaigns. It’s that the countervailing standards that constrained hero-worship of image started to diminish.

Few standards

Imagine that a candidate to be CEO of a large operation came to the board of directors and said what Kennedy was saying: I know you think you need one kind of CEO, but your customers like me using the product on Instagram.

The board would not be crazy to think customers, who might have had useful vibes about the product once it gets to market, nevertheless would have no basis to evaluate what kind of person would be required to run the company to get those products to market.

Whatever the board decided about this cheeky leadership candidate, they’d need a fixed standard against which to measure the new person’s qualities.

And to return from the boardroom analogy to the presidency: the Kennedy TV gambit demonstrates how candidates and parties build hiring standards for the American presidency on the fly.

This worried former president Truman, who called the primaries “eyewash” — superficial, without substance and not a good testing method for a serious job.

On the eve of the Democratic Convention in 1960, the 33rd president made a public statement calling out the young Kennedy: “Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or the country is ready for you in the role of president in January 1961? I have no doubt about the political heights to which you are destined to rise. But I’m deeply concerned and troubled about the situation we are up against in the world now and in the immediate future. That is why I hope that someone with the greatest possible maturity and experience would be available at this time. May I urge you to be patient.”

Truman knew how challenging it could be to be unprepared. When FDR died, Truman, his vice president, didn’t know there was an atomic bomb project, among other things. His experience so influenced him, Truman is the one who insisted that the CIA give national security briefings to both major party candidates before the election. He knew that the experience and information gap between candidate and president could be deadly.

Truman was trying to assert a presidential standard because there isn’t one.

You have to be 35, U.S. citizen, born in America. That’s it.

There is more rigor in an application for the makeup counter at Macy’s than there is in the formal presidential evaluation process. In a civilian job, applicants are asked when they solved a difficult conflict between co-workers, how they motivate others, how they communicate their ideas.

What’s the presidential job application look like?

What qualities, skills and attributes should the president have? Is it the person you’d like to have a beer with? Are governors good? How about a businessman? Once you’ve decided what qualities a president should have, how do you test if the candidate has them? And who does the testing? By what authority?

Hiring standards: modern and founders

There were presidential standards when the job was created.

At this point, you might expect me to exfoliate you with quotes from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 or the Federalist Papers, and you will get that treatment. But let me start with the present.

If you were designing a system for evaluating the qualities for the leader in a complex organization, how would you design the process? The answer comes from a vast billion-dollar industry devoted to helping corporations, nonprofits, the military pick talent by identifying the fit between job applicants and job they’re being hired for in order to maximize talent to the task.

What method do organizations use to fill top positions? First, they check candidate attributes — character, decisiveness, adaptability. The building blocks to succeed in an unpredictable environment. If the company wants an outsider, maybe from an entirely different industry, they still look to make sure the candidate’s values align with the company’s mission and goals.

Second, organizations seek to verify if a candidate’s stated skills have been proven in real-world scenarios. They talk to references who have seen the candidate in action, in roles similar to the one they’re applying for. That is, roughly speaking, how you’d design leadership for success in a modern large enterprise.

It’s pretty much exactly as the founders designed the presidency.

The executive office designed that hot summer in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention was built around the personal attributes of what they would call the president– the habits of mind, behavior, character, virtue. Most of all, virtue. The internal stuffing would allow a president to act wisely in unpredictable circumstances. But also, those traits would guard against despotism, which they believed naturally tempted anyone with enough ambition to lead and who would be given the kind of power they were giving a president.

The founders’ system didn’t just take it on faith, though, that a president would have these qualities. They built a system designed to use sources familiar with what a candidate’s attributes looked like in practice.

These references were called presidential electors.

Presidential electors, as Hamilton put it in Federalist [No.] 68, would be “most likely to have the information and discernment” to make a good choice and to avoid the election of anyone “not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

He went on to say, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”

I backed into the intentions of the founders because while, on the one hand, they’re relevant because we operate today in the system they designed, as a matter of argumentation, there are a lot of claims made where the warrant for the claim is merely a quote from the founders. I don’t think that’s enough. Plus, the founders were flawed in the light of their own times and flawed certainly by the analysis of today. But the selection process the founders designed has contemporary analogues today.

So, if our job in the press is to conduct a job interview, we have strong guidance: Evaluate candidate attributes. Seek demonstrated experience in relevant positions and first-hand candidate references, always keeping in mind the requirements of the job.

A contemporary and historical standard for the press to use, but it is in tension with the candidates and parties who would like to use another standard — the standard of public popularity, which they can sway.

And here, the founders really do have something to tell us about human nature because they were obsessed with it.

Campaigns are a contest to win power and the founders worried that to win power, candidates and parties would throw standards out the window. Then you’d have a lout in office without the internal attributes to check the temptation to misuse power.

Campaigns are about gaining power. Governing is about using it. The founders said it would be catastrophic if we fooled ourselves into thinking about a person who had the skills for attaining power would necessarily have the separate set of skills necessary to wield it wisely.

The sprawling presidency: assassinations and jokes

Standards are necessary because it’s a hard job.

Kennedy learned right away that Truman was right. “I wish I had spent more time learning how to be president instead of learning how to become president,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy came to office in the middle of its ongoing, increasing sprawl already far bigger than the founders had conceived. At the start of FDR’s term, there were half a million federal employees. There are now 2 million, with 1,400 of them subject to presidential appointment.

During FDR’s tenure, his entire cabinet could stand for a group photo and fit behind his desk. There were 11 of them.

(Social Security Administration) 

In the Biden Administration, there was not enough room in the Oval Office.

(The White House)

The Biden team was too big for the Oval Office. They had to go outside to capture all 26 of them. There’s still only one president!

But let me try to give you a human idea of what the job is like to be president. The contrasting duties. The high-stakes activities that take place outside the camera’s view. The absurdity.

There is perhaps no better contemporary example of the acute loneliness of presidential decisions than Barack Obama’s decision to kill Osama Bin Laden. High stakes for the men he ordered to do it. A geopolitical gamble because he was stomping on Pakistan’s sovereignty and if it failed, would have been a huge blow to U.S. prestige as America wrestled with ISIS.

During final run-up to making the decision — because it was such a big call — the president chaired national security meetings about the raid.

If I were managing an assassination of any kind, I’d clear my calendar. But a president can’t do that. Here are the other things President Obama had to tend to during that period:

He gave an education policy speech, met with leaders from Denmark, Brazil, and Panama; held meetings to avert a government shutdown; held fundraising dinners; gave a budget speech; attended a prayer breakfast; held immigration reform meetings; made the final determination on a new national security team and announced it; planned for his reelection campaign; and launched a military intervention in Libya.

The day before Obama chaired his last National Security Council meeting on the Bin Laden raid, his White House released his long-form birth certificate to answer persistent questions about his birthplace raised by the man who would be his successor. Obama then went to the White House correspondents’ dinner, knowing that he had launched the make-or-break operation and that it was already underway. With that on his mind, he told jokes as the traditions of his job required.

Some of his jokes that night were about Congress highlighting a reality that while the presidency has become more complex, the other branch of government is not shouldering the governing load.

In arguing about the complexity of the office, I am not arguing to cut presidents a break because they’re busy. No more than you’d cut a brain surgeon a break because it’s … well … brain surgery.

I’m arguing that if we know what the actual job is, we can accurately understand success and failure in that job to hold incumbents to account and test those who want the job.

If we don’t understand the job as it really exists, then we end up measuring the occupants by the wrong standard. It’s like measuring a brain surgeon by his ability to spell.

Modern coverage of presidency

While the presidency was getting harder, the primary medium for evaluating it — television — flattened the office.

Television did not give people an uncannily correct view of the office holder, as Kennedy had predicted. But it did turn presidential leadership into something you had to be able to see or it didn’t happen.

It wasn’t all television’s fault, though. When the president became the principle initiator of public policy in the 1930s — because the Great Depression and then World War II made the presidency the office to which Americans turned for help — it was natural for analysts and pundits to focus on the one actor’s public role. We see it in the contemporary misimpressions of Eisenhower’s presidency, the consistent misunderstanding that the public Eisenhower was the same as the private one. That was exacerbated by early television. But the misjudging was also part of the way presidents were now understood: Public face was all.

It became necessary to show the president doing even if there was nothing to do. So, to give one example in April 1970, a fire imperiled the Apollo 13 trip to the moon. There was nothing President Nixon could do in the middle of the night, but his national security sdvisor, Henry Kissinger, says he woke him anyway. “We couldn’t tell the public that we had not alerted the president,” said Kissinger. “It is important the public has a sense that the president is on top of the situation.”

This performative expectation overloaded the presidency. We expected to see the president acting and see results even when a) performance wasn’t the solution and even might hurt progress and b) performance created the expectation that results might come quickly, which, on complex issues, they don’t.

Even the most TV-focused president of our lifetime was frustrated about the requirement for performance. “Oh, he’s just watching TV,” said Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, referring to a regular critique if Trump wasn’t seen addressing a particular issue. “No, he’s doing things you can’t see because his first duty is to protect the American people.”

A contemporary example of this: An article recently questioned whether Biden’s theory of the presidency was being tested by a pile-up of events from the Middle East to Ukraine to China.

Evidence he was overmatched?

“For the second straight day,” reads the article “Biden also stayed entirely out of the public eye … Biden’s sole address to the nation in the wake of the attacks came hours after it, though it was announced that he would make public remarks on the crisis Tuesday. Since Saturday, he had stayed behind closed doors as cable news and social media were filled with gruesome images of the Hamas attacks.”

Proof that his presidency had tipped was based entirely on performance.

There are a whole host of things the president could and was doing out of sight that were more valuable but weren’t listed. Consulting allies, consulting enemies, talking to national security advisers about secret information, managing the hostage families, etc.

Every day, the White House declares a lid for the press to let them know the president will have no more public events for them to cover. When the Biden White House declared a lid early on a particular day, a number of his Republican opponents howled as if a president not seen was knocking off for the day.

“Alabamians don’t work those kind of hours,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

The political benefit of this critique is that it allows you to knock a president based on feeder review, which everybody congrats very easily and allows you to jump over any of the complexities of the issue.

When performance gains such primacy, it allows charismatic chaos entrepreneurs to have an effect over the system that their lack of experience would not otherwise grant them.

Congressman Matt Gaetz, who had sufficient power to depose a speaker, characterized the modern expectation this way: “If you’re not making news, you’re not governing.” This performative and ego-centered vision of governing is so backward that the founders would spin in their graves with such ferocity it would create the turbine energy sufficient to power a mid-sized Midwestern city.

My point is not that a president not seen is doing secret great work. It might be possible that the unseen work is calamitous or work not taking place behind the scenes is a dereliction.

We’re looking for balance:

• Reduce the weight we put on the work we can see unless it genuinely warrants it.
• Explain — even when you don’t have access to it, the work a president does that goes unseen.
• Recognize and cover lots of non-flashy governing work an administration does.

Striving to give people a view of the presidency that is outside of their view is the best way to help them stay informed about what the job requires.

Presidential coverage suffers from the “streetlight effect.” You know the old joke about the streetlight. A policeman comes upon a drunk on his hands and knees under a streetlight. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Looking for my keys,” says the drunk. “Did you drop them here?” “No, I dropped them in the park, but the light is better.”

Overemphasis on presidential communication

In 2010, a Slate magazine article about President Obama’s failure to sell health care was headlined “Death of a Salesman.” Obama, the golden-tongued orator of the 2008 campaign who sold himself to the electorate, had lost his key skill. He couldn’t sell health care.

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan took issue with the grand conclusions of the piece’s confident author.

“Presidents can rarely generate significant shifts in public opinion in support of their domestic policy agenda. Obama’s failure to generate increased support for the stimulus and health care is not the least bit surprising, especially given the political environment in which he’s operating,” [Nyhan wrote]. [The article’s author, John] Dickerson is constructing a post hoc narrative about Obama’s poll numbers using the epistemology of journalism, which treats tactics as the dominant causal force in politics. Within that worldview, if Obama’s numbers used to be high and they are now low, the only logical conclusion is that “his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged.”

Who was this Dickerson fellow?

Oh dear! I was the author of that Slate piece. And I was wrong. I had sallied forth with my confident analysis into the latest in a long line of analysts who thought presidential oratory was all and that when done well, it could change public minds. There’s no evidence for this.

I wasn’t alone during the Obama years. One of the most passed-around New York Times’s opinion pieces in the early Obama years was entitled “What Happened to Obama?” It argued he was in political trouble because he’d failed to tell a compelling narrative to win over people.

And the author of that article took it in the neck from political scientists, too.

“It’s hard to exaggerate just how wrong Westen’s argument is, starting with his assumption that policies flow ‘naturally’ from this ‘simple narrative,’” wrote Middlebury political scientist Matthew Dickinson. The argument “falls prey to a basic misconception: that a President can control the narrative by which the public defines his presidency.”

But the myth of this power [of] speechmaking will not die. Here’s a recent story, entitled “Biden’s Broken Bully Pulpit.”

“Biden, who was never a charismatic speaker in his political prime, is badly struggling to persuade the public of anything.”

The article argued that Biden was failing to convince people that the economy was getting better, as if effective speaking could somehow overcome people’s feelings about inflation, partisanship and the effects of partisan media.

The article cited FDR and his fireside chats as evidence that eloquent presidents can shape public opinion. That’s not correct. Two of FDR’s biggest failures were the subject of fireside chats and protracted sales campaigns — his effort to pack the court and purge Senate Democrats in primaries. Both failed.

What about Reagan, you might ask?

After Reagan won a landslide in 1984, Reagan tried to sell the country again on aid to the Contras. In April 1985, his pollster, Dick Wirthlin, explained where oratory worked and where it didn’t.

It worked “when the issue considered already has strong grassroots support.” And it worked when he “amplified the public’s political voice,” galvanizing popular sentiment that already existed.

Reagan failed when he tried to convince the public of something it did not believe, said pollster Wirthlin. “By raising the political stakes and the public saliency of this particular issue,” wrote Wirthlin, “you would not only put into jeopardy the favorable job approval you now enjoy, but, more importantly, you will generate more public and congressional opposition than support.”

Wirthlin was articulating what the great presidents knew about the limits of the office. “With public sentiment,” Lincoln said, “nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” FDR: “I cannot go any faster than the people will let me.”

The mismatch between our expectations of presidential rhetoric and the reality of its effectiveness is just one way our expectations for the office are misaligned. If we get the history wrong and have our expectations out of whack, we apply the wrong metric to presidencies, we deliver the wrong assessment that becomes the basis of voter decisions about accountability and support. And we fail to look at other institutions like Congress or local government for solutions because we’re expecting the presidency to do things it cannot.

Political scientist Nyhan — the one who helped bring me into the light — calls the expectation gap Green Lanternism, based on the DC comic book character whose power is determined by his willpower. The harder he wants something, the better chance he’ll achieve it.

In the presidential context, it is “the belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics.”

We see this particularly on the border. Both Trump and Biden suffer from the myth that they can do more at the border than they actually can.

A recent political science paper that Nyhan and his colleagues published sought to quantify the gap between the superhero expectations of the presidency and the reality of the job.

The frame for the investigation is the one that I’ve tried to pick from my talk tonight. The idea that unless people have the right frame for understanding the presidency, they won’t be able to hold presents to account for the right things and they won’t have the right frame for evaluating people who want the job.

Political scientists surveyed expert opinion on perceptions of presidential control. They asked experts to rate on a scale of 1-5 the level of control presidents have over various issues. The issues ranged from choosing a running mate to influencing forces like inflation rates and gas prices.

Regarding selecting a running mate, experts believed presidents had near maximum influence, rating it 4.3 out of 5, on average.

When it came to presidential control over inflation rates and gas prices, experts correctly asserted presidents have little control, rating those factors 1.69 and 1.92 out of 5, respectively.

Yet a CBS public opinion poll revealed a wildly different perception. Sixty percent of the public believes the president has control over inflation. Those respondents also said inflation was their most important issue. On their most important voting issue, their views are misaligned with the reality of the presidency.

That misimpression is created when you cover the presidency as a performance job where any problem can be solved through presidential willpower.

The way we campaign now

Now to presidential campaigns, Do we cover the office as it is or the office of mismatched expectations?

There are very few Teddy White style books in the early days of the republic because there were no campaigns to cover.

The founders thought any candidate who personally angled for the presidency was not fit for the job. Such outward ambition would lead to despotism once it was given presidential power. Standards of character, the stewardship obligations of the office, prevailed.

Standards of behavior were still quite robust 70 years ago. Two aspects that define the modern campaign were shocking novelties then. In 1948, the Washington Post wrote an editorial chastising president Harry Truman for speaking “off the cuff,” as it was called at that time. Wrote the Post: “When the President speaks, something more than an off the cuff opinion or remark is expected.” The paper reminded him that the whole world was watching.

On Sept. 29, 1956, the Cedar Rapids Gazette front page read: “Ike setting up policy of firing back.” In Delphos, Ohio, the front page read: “Fire Back When Rivals Go Too Far — Ike’s New Policy.” The Daily Herald in Tyrone, Pennsylvania heralded: “Ike decides to answer Demo ‘lies.'” This was a novelty — a presidential incumbent responding to a challenger, because Eisenhower had previously resisted participating in what he called the “noise and extravagance” of the campaign.

By the way, the “firing back” amounted to correcting challenger Adelie Stevenson’s figures about inflation.

The point: Standards of reason, logic, probity, decorum, a sense of the weight, even of campaign speech, governed the campaign.

But as performance became the thing in campaigns and the audience determined what worked, rather than elected politicians in the parties, standards became more malleable. Authenticity is now the thing. Using a teleprompter to deliver thought-out remarks is a sign you’re a phony.

Party insiders who once paid attention to standards were replaced in the nominating process by the direct will of the people, which has many salutary benefits. Representation of minorities, weakening bossism. But the role Hamilton talked about, that Truman tried to play with Kennedy, disappeared. Superdelegates — insiders, elected officials, those in the political swim — whose votes were once given extra weight in party nominating conventions are gone now.

As the candidate became the tribune of party voters, they had to stay in sync with what excited activist voters. When the base wasn’t excited, the candidate had to goose them to a roar. The presidency was designed to require cool reason, but selection for it now required hot-headed antics to get raise money, capture social media and win over key activists.

“I’d get out there and I would talk about policy and there was no adrenaline rush and people kind of went ‘uh-huh, uh-huh,’ said Howard Dean of being a candidate. “And I really wanted that huge charge of being able to crank them all up and get enthusiastic and I would succumb to that.”

If we reverse-engineered the presidency from the campaign as we cover it, the American president would spend hours a day raising money, listening to the bad ideas of billionaires, speaking only to people who agree with him, and addressing not national questions, but the ones that get his jumpy friends most jumpy.

Complex problems, when they appeared, according to the logic of the campaign, would be solved with an entertaining Tweet or a snappy debate comeback.

The president as chief partisan warrior has led to what UVA’s [the University of Virginia’s] Sid Milkas calls “executive centered partisanship.” Candidates mobilize ideological supporters in campaigns. They don’t compete to solve common problems and when those candidates get into office, the requirement to mobilize on ideological grounds continues.

The most recent example of how a president as a partisan warrior drives the partisan agenda came when Donald Trump pushed Republican senators to kill immigration reform with Joe Biden so that it would help Trump in the election. It wasn’t a policy disagreement. It was purely political.

Now Sen. Chuck Grassley says he’s skeptical about bi-partisan tax reform, which would help kids in poverty, because he says it would give Biden a win in an election year.

Imbalance in campaign coverage

How are we doing covering this campaign landscape? From here on out where I talk about us, I do not absent myself from the critique — things I have done, or failed to do or could do better.

First, there’s too much coverage of what has long been called the horse race. Who is up and who is down? What tactics are being used? Thomas Patterson’s, from this very institution, study of the 2016 race found only 10% of television political coverage was about issues. The rest horse race.

This is the most familiar critique and I’d like defend it. It would be crazy not to cover how presidents win power. Understanding the tactics explains why they won. Furthermore, understanding how campaigns work explains why money influences governing and how voters pressure presidents.

Also, it’s not the press that forces the horse race on the audience. People love the horse race. I’ve been on the road covering politics for 30 years more or less. What do you get asked? Horse race questions.

What should we cover? I’ll get to specifics in a minute, but the horse race illustrates, in the easiest way, the all-encompassing problem: The press is too wedded to covering the structure of how parties select presidents. We need to stay put and cover the presidency itself, by the standards of the office.

In the same way people talk about outsourcing to social media the curation of our information diets and handing ourselves over to the algorithms unaligned with our interests, the press has done this with campaigns. When we cover just the campaign as it takes place before us, we are handing over our framing responsibility to people who do not have the public’s interest at heart. They have the candidate’s interest at heart. The party’s interest at heart. They have power at heart.

Second, we all took Kennedy’s argument too far. We thought we could form uncannily correct conclusions. When we were let down, we didn’t drop the patent scoring. We asked for ever-greater displays of it. Now authenticity becomes the most important attribute in a campaign, though it is not the most important attribute in governing.

This excessive emphasis on authenticity was captured in the New Yorker cartoon by Paul Noth.

The candidate, a wolf, is running on eating sheep. “I will eat you,” reads his billboard. One of the sheep grazing beneath it says: “He tells it like it is.”

Third problem, we are obsessed with polls. The issue of the economy is a good example of how this puts us off course. Instead of explaining the economy so that people might have a better understanding of a president’s control over inflation or not, we just poll people about how they feel about inflation.

They say they’re concerned about inflation and we ask candidates what their plan is for inflation without stopping to think if a president has much control over inflation or whether there are 20 other economic issues we should be asking about where a president does have a hand.

More broadly, polling about issues has become less useful in our partisan age. Here is a graph charting views about the economy by party.

A vast number of Republicans started thinking the economy was awful the minute Biden was elected. Given that feelings about the economy are now a proxy for presidential preference, we shouldn’t treat them as Solomonic views of real life.

The problem with polling like this is people in the press are apt to draw conclusions about policy from these polls. If the public doesn’t like what Biden is doing, that his policies must be bad. But that isn’t so. Biden may have awful policies, but many of them don’t like what Biden is doing because he’s on the wrong team.

The fourth point about the way we cover campaigns: In presidential campaigns, we don’t keep in mind the office of the presidency as it actually operates.

This has a few elements to it:

First, we spend good deal a less time on foreign policy in campaigns than the presidency does.

“The biggest shock presidents face is that eighty-five to ninety percent of the job is all about foreign policy, which is about five percent of the campaign,” says Elaine Kamarck, author of Why Presidents Fail, formerly of the Kennedy School. “All of the sudden you’re having to make decisions and learn about countries and meet with world leaders and then on top of that there’s the secret world of intelligence.”

No greater example of the mismatch than the 2000 presidential race. During the Bush v. Gore presidential debates, the word “terrorism” never came up. It defined the next two presidential terms and beyond.

Second, we don’t test for surprises.

I asked Condi Rice what question I should ask candidates. She said, “Ask them what would surprise them and how would they handle it.” The point was to see if they understood that surprises are central to the job — terrorist attacks, pandemics.

In 1913, after Woodrow Wilson became president, he remarked, “It would be an irony of fate, if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs, for all of my preparation has been in domestic matters.” Fate responded. Wilson soon faced World War I.

Here’s something a presidential primary candidate said in a GOP primary debate I moderated in 2016. “The next president is going to be confronted with an unforeseen challenge. That’s almost certain. It could be a pandemic, a major natural disaster or an attack on our country. The question for South Carolinians and Americans is who do you want to have sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office?”

It’s a truth that the son and brother of presidents would know. But since it was Jeb Bush and Trump had declared him low energy, no one paid attention.

He was prescient about the pandemic, which has led some QAnon chaos entrepreneurs to claim Jeb knew something about COVID-19, which is, of course, preposterous since that was Taylor Swift’s operation.

The presidency is an organization not a single-person office. When I wrote a book on the presidency, I asked presidents and presidential aides in every administration going back to the Johnson administration what one quality they’d want to know about a president and they all said, “Who is going to be on their team.” Who will surround them?

When was the last time the press asked a candidate about his or her team-building skills?

But this is what they say about team building in other large organization:

“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person,” says Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. “The secret of my success is that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world,” said Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Mike Bloomberg talked about the press’s misunderstanding about this in the mayoral context:

“The press wants to write the ‘100-day story,'” [Bloomberg says]. “They asked: ‘What’d you do in the first 100 days?’ And I said, ‘I built my team.’ And they responded, ‘Yes, but what legislation did you pass? What did you accomplish?’ And I said, ‘I built my team.’ They never got the concept.”

So what should we do?

Now to what the press should do. Our final section. We’re almost home. These are the things I tell myself. I’d paste them on the mirror, but there would be no room for mirror left.

Cover what the job requires — team building, experience making decisions — and what is realistic. But also highlight governing qualities like restraint, character, temperament.

Those are fuzzy qualities, so explain in practical terms what those words mean in the job.

Character, for example, is so crucial to the job a presidential campaign book is called Character Above All, which captures the basic idea that it’s a lonely job and a president needs an internal compass to make tough decisions.

If we let the campaign define character, it could mean anything. In 1992, it meant Bill Clinton’s private behavior. Republicans have dropped that idea. Now some of them define character as saying offensive things and being proud of it.

In 2008, Mike Huckabee said a rival’s lack of honesty was disqualifying: “If he lies in the campaign, he’ll lie as president.” In 2024, Huckabee campaigned for Trump, whose number of campaign and governing lies set records.

The political scientist James Wilson’s definition of character is the useful one: “empathy and self-control.”

We need to explain what these characteristics mean in practice.

Empathy means taking into account the rights, needs and feelings of all, which a president of a nation must do. So we should ask questions that explore that.

Self-control is vital because the presidency is a constant test of fealty to duty over personal desire. It is a job of action, but frequently not acting — restraint — is the key action because you must keep long-term consequences in mind. We should explore how candidates have shown restraint and think about it.

Second, don’t let the parties pick the issues. Candidates and parties want to talk about wedge issues that spark their voters and make the other candidate look bad. This grabs attention, fuels social media, raises money.

It often does the country no good. It lets candidates duck tough issues and avoids educating the public about the most important issues.

We should cover the stories that affect large numbers of people and over which the federal government has considerable influence: health care, immigration, income inequality, the death of the middle class, foreign policy, the environment and energy.

These matter to more Americans and candidates need to have answers for those issues, especially if they don’t want to talk about them.

Stay close to the electorate. Listen for their issues. Not every opinion is useful. Twitter proved that. But policy is connected to candidates through humans and humans remind reporters to be humble and keep us centered on why we’re doing this.

Covering an issue means more than listing candidate positions. It means illuminating the tradeoffs they’ll face:

• deficit reduction versus investment.

• spending versus taxes.

• immigration versus labor markets.

Presidential campaigns are a national moment to examine important issues, whether candidates have anything to contribute or not. So if the polling shows people are wrong about the unemployment rate, inflation, growth, we should aim our energy at explanation just as we would if they were wrong about a public health measure.

Don’t spend too much time asking voters who they think will handle the economy better. Ground stories in specific challenges candidates and the country will face:

• Will a candidate extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts?

• How will they invest in a future affected by AI?

• Does the COVID-19 generational learning loss matter to American productivity?

• How will tight immigration laws affect inflation?

• Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt? What are the options?

The Wall Street Journal did this nicely with a piece recently headlined “$6 Trillion in Taxes Are at Stake in This Year’s Elections.” WSJ explaining that the ultimate resolution will affect family budgets, corporate profits and the federal government’s fiscal health amid rising debt.

This also means covering the issues that will surprise the next president. If a Time article in 2000 could say “our next President may preside over the first catastrophic terrorist attack,” debate moderators could have been forward thinking enough to ask about that issue in debates. Candidates will dodge, yes, but a) we shouldn’t settle for that, and b) even if they do, keeping the surprise question front and center reminds all voters it’s something we should keep in mind when making our selection.

Third, make context king.

Now to Teddy White. I am an acolyte. Just out of college, I bought all of his books used at the Strand bookstore. I read them as a campaign reporter. I read them again for my campaign podcast and book Whistlestop. I have the 1972 [book The] Making of the President that Time’s Hugh Sidey, a great chronicler of the presidency, loaned me that has an inscription from White, which is like having a Babe Ruth bat signed over to Hank Aaron.

White gets grief for launching scooplet journalism, but I loved him for the exact opposite reason. He helped teach me about going up to 30,000 feet. Seeing the larger context in small acts.

That’s the instinct we should cultivate on every presidential story. What’s the larger context? So when Donald Trump and Joe Biden each visit striking UAW [United Auto Workers] workers, don’t talk about Michigan voters or blue collar workers. Talk about the fraying of the social contract between companies and their workers, the status of the American Dream, what one generation owes another, what government can effectively do to create opportunity.

This particularly relates to covering the threats to Democracy. That is the ultimate context exercise. You can’t do any of what I’m talking about tonight if the system for elections is corroded.

Fourth, cover events outside the campaign with a presidential mindset.

The press can keep voters attuned to a president’s obligations by adding a note about presidential context to reports otherwise focused on other topics. For example, Sweden joining NATO is about fallout from Russia’s invasion, Turkey, Hungary, etc., but the story also speaks to U.S. commitments abroad and whether presidents will uphold them.

Similarly, record Affordable Care Act enrollment raises questions around candidates caring for the vital program.

Discussions at Davos about hypothetical pandemics get at the surprises presidents face and the long-term thinking the job demands. Almost every major story has a presidential angle about duties, character and mindset.

Putting 2024 in context

I will conclude with this specific presidential campaign. I can’t talk about keeping a campaign in context of the presidency without addressing the special context of the 2024 campaign.

Earlier, I said we’re a long way off giving voters the material to judge candidates on a logical standard.

The two components of that evaluation standard are an understanding of a candidate’s attributes, behaviors, habits of mind and, second, an evaluation from credible references about how a candidate would do when faced with presidential-level challenges.

In general, that’s missing from campaigns. But in 2024, we have the most information we’ve ever had on those two tests for Donald Trump.

The information about Donald Trump has come in books, of course. But what elevates the quality of material is that much of the information has come under oath, under penalty of perjury, by people who would not talk to authors. From the Jan. 6 committee testimony and soon trials, we have testimony about Donald Trump’s personal attributes and actions as president in the months after he lost the election in his attempt to overturn the election.

We also have testimony from the leaders of his party. The top Republican in the Senate, the top Republican in the House, the last Republican vice president and admirers like Sen. Lindsey Graham. These are officials in the elector model Hamilton talked about. All said, Donald Trump was responsible for the attack on the capitol and for doing nothing once it happened.

Direct, verifiable views about an effort to undermine the constitution by a president sworn to protect it.

We also have first-hand testimony from those who worked closest to the GOP front-runner with standing to make judgments about how he behaves when faced with presidential tasks. Secretaries of defense, attorney general, chief lawyer, chiefs of staff. The New York Times counted 18 of such rank. They all say he is unfit for the office. If you were hiring a CEO, what would you think of a candidate who had 18 high-level negative references.

I have tried to build a case here that the press has an obligation and opportunity to keep coverage focused on a logical and historical standard of the presidency. On the basis of that standard, Donald Trump gets disqualifying marks. The only way to escape that conclusion is to wave away standards, or create new ones. But to create new standards would be for the purpose of electing a person to another job, not the presidency of the United States.

We have drifted in our coverage of the presidency — by circumstance, the financial squeeze on journalism, spectacle, pressure from public outrage over genuine disappointment with office-holders and reporters alike. Evaluations of who is fit to occupy the office must return to what I was struck by 20 years ago in George W. Bush’s driveway: a focus on what the president’s actual duties in office are. That is the job those of us in the press must now return to doing.

Qualified applicants welcomed.

The post The presidency above the campaign: A lecture by CBS Prime Time anchor John Dickerson appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Last month, a robocall impersonating U.S. President Joe Biden went out to New Hampshire voters, advising them not to vote in the state’s presidential primary election.  The voice, generated by artificial intelligence, sounded quite real.

“Save your vote for the November election,” the voice stated, falsely asserting that a vote in the primary would prevent voters from being able to participate in the November general election.  

The robocall incident reflects a growing concern that generative AI will make it cheaper and easier to spread misinformation and run disinformation campaigns. The Federal Communications Commission last week issued a ruling to make AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal.

Deepfakes already have affected other elections around the globe. In recent elections in Slovakia, for example, AI-generated audio recordings circulated on Facebook, impersonating a liberal candidate discussing plans to raise alcohol prices and rig the election. During the February 2023 Nigerian elections, an AI-manipulated audio clip falsely implicated a presidential candidate in plans to manipulate ballots. With elections this year in over 50 countries involving half the globe’s population, there are fears deepfakes could seriously undermine their integrity.  

Media outlets including the BBC and the New York Times sounded the alarm on deepfakes as far back as 2018. However, in past elections, including the 2022 U.S. midterms, the technology did not produce believable fakes and was not accessible enough, in terms of both affordability and ease of use, to be “weaponized for political disinformation.” Instead, those looking to manipulate media narratives relied on simpler and cheaper ways to spread disinformation, including mislabeling or misrepresenting authentic videos, text-based disinformation campaigns, or just plain old lying on air.  

As Henry Ajder, a researcher on AI and synthetic media writes in a 2022 Atlantic piece, “It’s far more effective to use a cruder form of media manipulation, which can be done quickly and by less sophisticated actors, than to release an expensive, hard-to-create deepfake, which actually isn’t going to be as good a quality as you had hoped.” 

As deepfakes continually improve in sophistication and accessibility, they will increasingly contribute to the deluge of informational detritus. They’re already convincing. Last month, The New York Times published an online test inviting readers to look at 10 images and try to identify which were real and which were generated by AI, demonstrating first-hand the difficulty of differentiating between real and AI-generated images. This was supported by multiple academic studies, which found that “faces of white people created by AI systems were perceived as more realistic than genuine photographs,” New York Times reporter Stuart A. Thompson explained.

Listening to the audio clip of the fake robocall that targeted New Hampshire voters, it is difficult to distinguish from Biden’s real voice.  

The jury is still out on how generative AI will impact this year’s elections. In a December blog post on GatesNotes, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates estimates we are still “18-24 months away from significant levels of AI use by the general population” in high-income countries. In a December post on her website “Anchor Change,” Katie Harbath, former head of elections policy at Facebook, predicts that although AI will be used in elections, it will not be “at the scale yet that everyone imagines.” 

Beware the “Liar’s Dividend”

It may, therefore, not be deepfakes themselves, but the narrative around them that undermines election integrity. AI and deepfakes will be firmly in the public consciousness as we go to the polls this year, with their increased prevalence supercharged by outsized media coverage on the topic. In her blog post, Harbath adds that it’s “the narrative of what havoc AI could have that will have the bigger impact.” 

There are already notable examples of the liar’s dividend in political contexts. In recent elections in Turkey, a video tape surfaced showing compromising images of a candidate. In response, the candidate claimed the video was a deepfake when it was, in fact, real.

In April 2023, an Indian politician claimed that audio recordings of him criticizing members of his party were AI-generated. But a forensic analysis suggested at least one of the recordings was authentic.  

Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel Schiff, and Natalia Buen, researchers who study the impacts of AI on politics, carry out experiments to understand the impacts of the liar’s dividend on audiences. In an article forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, they note that in refuting authentic media as fake, bad actors will either blame their political opposition or “an uncertain information environment.”

Their findings suggest that the liar’s dividend becomes more powerful as people become more familiar with deepfakes. In turn, media consumers will be primed to dismiss legitimate campaign messaging. It is therefore imperative for the public to be confident that we can differentiate between real and manipulated media. 

Journalists have a crucial role to play in responsible reporting on AI. Widespread news coverage of the Biden robocalls and recent Taylor Swift deepfakes demonstrate that distorted media can be debunked, due to the resources of governments, technology professionals, journalists, and, in the case of Swift, an army of superfans.

This reporting should be balanced with a healthy dose of skepticism on the impact of AI in this year’s elections. Self-interested technology vendors will be prone to overstate its impact. AI may be a stalking horse for broader dis- and misinformation campaigns exploiting worsening integrity issues on these platforms. 

How lawmakers are trying to combat the problem

Lawmakers across states have introduced legislation to combat election-related AI-generated dis- and misinformation. These bills would require disclosure of the use of AI for election-related content in Alaska, Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, South Dakota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Indiana, Idaho and Wyoming. Most of the bills would require that information to be disclosed within specific time frames before elections. A bill in Nebraska would ban all deepfakes within 60 days of an election.

However, the introduction of these bills does not necessarily mean they will become law. Furthermore, their enforceability could be challenged on the grounds of free speech, based on positioning AI-generated content as satire. Moreover, penalties would only occur after the fact or be evaded by foreign entities.  

Social media companies hold the most influence in limiting the spread of false content, being able to detect and remove it from their platforms. However, the policies of major platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok state they will only remove manipulated content for cases of “egregious harm” or if it aims to mislead people about voting processes. This is in line with a general relaxation in moderation standards, including repeals of 17 policies at the former three companies related to hate speech, harassment and misinformation in the last year. 

Their primary response to AI-generated content will be to label it as ‘AI-generated.’ For Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, this will apply to all AI-generated content, whereas for X (formally Twitter), these labels will apply to content identified as “misleading media,” as noted in recent policy updates.

This puts the onus on users to recognize these labels, which are not yet rolled out and will take time to adjust to. Furthermore, AI-generated content may evade the detection of already overstretched moderation teams and not be removed or labeled, creating false security for users. Moreover, with the exception of X (formerly Twitter)’s policy these labels do not specify whether a piece of content is harmful, only that it is AI-generated.

A deepfake made purely for comedic purposes would be labeled, but a manually altered video spreading disinformation might not. Recent recommendations from the oversight board of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, advise that “instead of focusing on how a distorted image, video or audio clip was created, the company’s policy should focus on the harm manipulated posts can cause.”  

The continued emergence of deepfakes is worrying, but they represent a new weapon in the arsenal of disinformation tactics deployed by bad actors rather than a new frontier. The strategies to mitigate the damage they cause are the same as before – developing and enforcing responsible platform design and moderation, underpinned by legal mandates where feasible, coupled with journalists and civic society holding the platforms accountable. These strategies are now more important than ever. 

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In 2022, 30 public radio stations across 25 states asked listeners for their biggest questions in advance of that year’s election. What they learned: People really want to know how to judge the judges on their ballot.

The effort was part of the Midterm Election Project from America Amplified, a nationwide community journalism engagement initiative for public media, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Voters are often confronted at the polling booth with a list of judicial candidates. For civil court judge. Appellate court judge. Surrogate’s court judge. These positions are important because local and state judges, by the nature of the job, hold massive sway over people’s lives every day. Yet many voters have no idea who the candidates vying for these positions are or what kinds of work the various judges do. 

“When it comes to the public’s interaction with the government, with public spaces, lower courts are really where the rubber meets the road,” says Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a founding editor of State Court Report. “If someone has to go to court for some reason, whether it’s as a party in a case or because of jury duty, these are the courts they are most likely going to interact with as citizens.”

Voters are often interested in the judicial philosophy of candidates running, particularly those running for state high courts, which “are increasingly being asked to decide the highest profile legal fights of today,” Keith adds. For example, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion afforded by its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Since then, abortion legality has returned to the states, where lawsuits over legislation or constitutional language allowing or prohibiting abortions could end with decisions by state high courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court only accepts around 2% of the roughly 7,000 cases brought for its consideration yearly, meaning on many legal matters state courts have the final say. One philosophical area where judges often differ is whether foundational legal documents, such as constitutions, are or are not open to interpretation given current cultural contexts and case precedents.

News audiences are also interested in what candidates are or would be like on the bench — courteous or belligerent? — often referred to as their judicial temperament.

Finally, news audiences also need a basic understanding of the hierarchy of their local and state legal systems and how cases move through the courts.

In advance of the 2024 U.S. general elections, we’re offering eight tips to empower newsrooms to create judicial election guides, which, as of now, are few and far between.

To help develop this guide to creating your judicial election guide, we reached out to journalists at three news outlets that have done it before: Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent.

• For last year’s election cycle, Spotlight PA created more than a dozen voting guides on a variety of topics, from how to vote by mail to state Supreme Court races to how voters can check their registration or change parties.
  
  “There’s no one way to run a court system in this country, and I think voters get confused about how these elections work, through no fault of their own, because they’re often the elections that get the absolute least attention,” says Katie Meyer, government editor at Spotlight PA, an independent nonprofit newsroom focusing on state government and policy, founded in 2019 by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
  
  
• Brianna Lee is an engagement producer with LAist, part of Southern California Public Radio. Lee, with reporter Caitlin Hernández, put together that outlet’s 2022 guide to judicial candidates running for Los Angeles Superior Court. She notes that the more public information that is available on judicial candidates, the better equipped voters are to “put responsible people in positions of power.”
  
  “And the less informed you are, and the less information is out there, the more that the people in power get to be put into those seats of power by a shrinking number of people,” Lee adds.
  
  
• For its 2022 guide, The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit news outlet founded by veteran political journalist Jon Ralston, convened and sought insight from a panel of twelve experts from various legal disciplines, including attorneys who had appeared before many of the candidates running for judgeships in that state.
  
  “Our mission should be, as journalists, to keep the populace as fully informed as possible,” Ralston says. “This is one area where people are woefully uninformed, and it’s not their fault. But if you haven’t had experience in front of a judge, you won’t know much about judging.”

With insights from Meyer, Keith, Lee and Ralston, here’s how to get started creating your own judicial election guide in 2024 and beyond.

1. Get to know how your state and local court systems operate.

Before creating a voter guide, it’s important to thoroughly understand the hierarchy of the court system in the state or region you cover, as well as how judges end up on the ballot.

In many states, there are trial courts that hear cases about alleged crimes, specialized courts, such as family courts, which hear civil cases, appellate courts that hear appeals to criminal or civil verdicts, and a high court, often but not always called the supreme court, that has the final say on cases at the state level.

Court systems differ state to state. For example, in New York, judges of the Supreme Court are not the last but the first to hear certain felony cases, followed by intermediate appellate courts. The hierarchy of criminal and civil cases in New York ends at the Court of Appeals.

These resources from the Brennan Center are a great place to start understanding judicial systems:

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection | Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map

The Brennan Center has distilled high level trends of how judges gain office, across the country and at various court levels. In 39 states, voters choose judges in public elections or choose whether to retain previously appointed judges. These latter elections happen in 16 states and are called retention elections. A governor makes an initial judicial appointment, then, after a term, these judges run unopposed in a simple yes-or-no vote to keep their jobs.

In yet another example of why it is important to understand how judges gain office, consider the system in New Mexico, where “judges are initially appointed by the governor, must then compete in a partisan election during the next general election, and then are reselected in unopposed retention elections,” according to the Brennan Center.

State rules often, but not always, require that candidates at least be licensed to practice law in the state to become a judge.

Ballotpedia offers a rundown of qualification requirements by state here.

Finally, it is a good idea to interrogate how much of a choice voters really have in competitive elections. Do judges in your area often run unopposed? If so, how did that name end up on the ballot and why are there no other options?

“New York is a good example of this, the process to get on the ballot is more opaque,” says Keith of the Brennan Center. “Many voters will show up to vote for judgeships in New York and what they will see when they look at the ballot is that the decision has actually already been made for them. There is no alternative choice.”

2. Make a plan you can realistically execute, and remember that something is better than nothing.

The guides from Spotlight PA, LAist and The Nevada Independent are different and were produced in different ways, reflecting the editorial judgment, staffing abilities and audience needs of each organization.

One big thing they have in common: they got done.

“Honestly, if you have anything, that’s better than nothing,” Lee says.

Consider the scope of your project and the effort required. There’s more than one way to create a good guide, even with a small team.

Spotlight PA dedicated several reporters and editors to creating their multi-topic guides and interactive tool.

“You’ve got to put the manpower behind it,” Meyer says. “But if this is the kind of thing you care about, I can’t recommend it enough, because our readers really found it useful.”

For its 2022 guide to the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge race, LAist repurposed a 2018 on-air interview with Stuart Rice, a former president of the California Judges Association, who provided useful context on what the court does and how best to evaluate judicial candidates. Lee and Hernandez then compiled and listed information on each candidate, including their websites and candidate ratings from a local bar association.

The Nevada Independent sent a detailed questionnaire to each candidate, asking for their specific areas of legal expertise, whether there were legal areas they were less confident in presiding over, how the context surrounding a case could affect sentencing decisions, and other information that could affect how candidates would perform.

The panel of legal experts also provided editors with snippets of their personal perspectives on the judges. For example, one panelist described Judge Deborah Westbrook, who won a six-year term on the Nevada Court of Appeals, as “probably one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever interacted with.”

3. Enlist outside support if staffing is a challenge. Local law schools and bar associations can help.

Spotlight PA is specifically focused on government and policy, so it makes sense they would devote significant staff time to their guide.

“But I’ve also done it as a single reporter who doesn’t have that kind of support,” Meyer says. “There are resources. I really recommend your state bar association.”

The General Bar has links to state bar associations here.

This is essentially what LAist did for their 2022 guide, compiling the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s publicly available ratings — “well qualified,” “qualified” or “not qualified” — of attorneys running for judgeships. Those ratings are “based on a lot of interviews and personal recommendations and references that a whole panel of the bar association does every single election,” Lee says.

But reporters should be aware there may be elements of the ratings process that are not transparent. If possible, ask bar association officials for clarity on the step-by-step process behind their ratings. Still, Lee notes that such ratings are often one of the best gauges available for assessing candidates.

In addition to legal associations that can give a sense of a candidate’s qualifications and potential temperament on the bench, lean on local law schools for research help. This is what The Nevada Independent did for its 2022 guide, turning to students at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Setting up the arrangement was straightforward.

“We went to them and said, ‘We want to partner with you on this,’” Ralston says.

The law students researched the cases the candidates had handled either as judges or attorneys, producing a report on each candidate for the Nevada Independent editors. If, on the questionnaire, a candidate pointed to a case they were proud of having argued or presided over, the law students would research that case to assess whether the candidate was accurately describing it.

For The Nevada Independent, the biggest resource lift was not editorial but technical, in creating web templates and pages. The students benefit too, Ralston says.

“There’s been a couple of deans now that we’ve gone through, but both have been enthusiastic in saying, ‘This is a great exercise for the law students,’” he says.

4. Ground your reporting in real cases having to do with well-known people.

As you explore the ins and outs of how the judicial system works in your coverage area, take note of highly publicized cases involving well-known people. Grounding the legal process with names audiences are familiar with is a useful way to present the information. “It kind of tethers it to reality,” says Meyer.

Spotlight PA, in its interactive tool, used the example of a drug and weapons case against rapper Meek Mill, who was born and raised in Philadelphia. Mill was arrested in 2007 then sentenced to jail in the Philadelphia Court of Commons Pleas, according to Spotlight PA. Over the intervening decade, judges on the state Supreme Court, the highest court, and the Superior Court, one of the state’s appellate courts, granted Mill bail and eventually vacated the conviction.

“Mill’s high-profile case illustrates the circuitous path cases can take through the commonwealth’s justice system — and also, the ease with which convicted offenders can find themselves back in prison thanks to long parole terms,” writes Spotlight PA democracy editor Elizabeth Estrada.

5. Dig into the case history of judges running for office.

Another daunting part of creating a judicial voting guide: wading through and understanding years, potentially, of decisions across multiple candidates.

These decisions are likely to be most informative among higher court judges. Keith notes that lower courts often do not write lengthy opinions. Judges on higher courts may or may not offer such writings, which often comes down to the “legal culture” of the state, he says.

Look online for high court opinions, and even lower court decisions. Many states, including California, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Florida make appellate and high court opinions, and sometimes lower court decisions, available online.

Still, when these opinions do exist, they can provide valuable insight into a judge’s jurisprudence, or legal philosophy, which is something voters choosing high court judges especially want to know about.

Reading through past decisions is “a little easier than a lot of people think it’s going to be, even if you’re not a lawyer,” says Meyer, who adds that, in her experience, judges often write using plain language. “And if you do get lost, which I have so many times, call a lawyer. Have a lawyer kind of walk you through.”

Wondering if a candidate has faced judicial misconduct allegations in the past? States typically have independent commissions that investigate allegations of judicial misconduct. Decisions are often readily available online.

6. Talk to recently retired judges for insights on how the judicial system works, as well as the ideal temperament of potential judges.

Judges are unlikely to comment on pending cases, but sitting judges and recently retired judges can help journalists and audiences understand how courts function day-to-day while providing insight into the judicial temperaments that tend to do well within a system.

Ask questions like, “What personality characteristics are necessary for someone to do a good job at the job you yourself did for years?” But also know that some retired judges may be guarded against inviting public scrutiny to the courts where they spent their professional careers.

“You will find former judges who chafe at the [public] attention a bit,” Keith says. “We will hear judges who say, ‘You can’t assess the quality of a judge based on a few data points.’ There might be some truth to that. But it also might just be that judges are comfortable in the system that they came up in, and increased attention and accountability can make some of them nervous.”

The Nevada Independent’s panel of legal experts, which included several attorneys who had appeared before the candidates running for judgeships in 2022, brought insight into the judicial temperament of those candidates. Published comments from panelists about the candidates included things like, “very prepared, very smart,” “fair minded” and “the type of person that is going to pick things up quickly.”

7. Follow the money. There is more of it than ever in judicial races.

The groups and individuals funding candidates’ races can say a lot about the candidates themselves and can even influence decisions, Keith says. To learn more, Keith recommends the research of Michael Kang at Northwestern University and Joanna Shepherd at Emory University, collected in their 2023 book Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections.

Elections where the ideological balance of the court is at stake tend to attract the most money, according to the latest Brennan Center report on money in judicial elections, covering the 2021 to 2022 cycle. Total spending on judicial races topped $100 million, twice any other midterm cycle. In 2023, donors spent more than $50 million on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race alone, the report notes.

“The decision eliminating the federal right to an abortion crystalized the reality that as federal courts limit the protections provided by the U.S. Constitution, state courts will increasingly decide today’s highest-stakes legal fights,” Keith writes.

Use campaign finance watchdog FollowTheMoney to start understanding and reporting on the flow of money into individual campaigns. Janet Protasiewicz, for example, raised $16.7 million during her winning race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, according to FollowTheMoney.

8. Remember: Your audience wants and needs information on judicial candidates.

Lee, Meyer and Ralston all say that the guides their outlets produced have been well received by their audiences. Voters want information about judicial candidates, they say, and audiences are grateful for any amount of information news organizations are able to publish.

Audience feedback can also inform future judicial election guides. Spotlight PA, for example, began creating guides on retention elections because they heard from readers asking for more about those elections.

“People generally will only tell you when they don’t like something when you’re in the business we’re in,” says Ralston, the Nevada Independent founder. “‘You made this mistake. You’re biased,’ all the rest of that. But I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive feedback we got from people saying, ‘I’m taking this guide into the voting booth with me. Thank you for doing this.’”

Additional resources

The Politics of Judicial Elections, 2021–2022
Douglas Keith. The Brennan Center for Justice, New York University, January 2024.

Why Judges Matter
Elizabeth Estrada. Spotlight PA, October 2023.

Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections
Michael Kang and Joanna Shepherd. Stanford University Press, August 2023.

Significant Figures in Judicial Selection
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, April 2023.

Judicial Selection: An Interactive Map
The Brennan Center for Justice. New York University, October 2022.

LA Superior Court Judges
Brianna Lee and Caitlin Hernández. LAist, October 2022.

The Indy 2022 Judicial Race Project
The Nevada Independent, 2022.

Judicial Temperament, Explained
Terry Maroney. Judicature, Summer 2021.

Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism: The Conceptual Structure of the Great Debate
Lawrence Solum. Northwestern University Law Review, April 2019.

The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America
Jed Shugerman. Harvard University Press, February 2012.

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Major public health and medical associations in the U.S., including the American College of Physicians, American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association have recognized voting as a social determinant of health and have called for equitable access to voting, including for people with disabilities.

A growing body of research shows that voting and health are intertwined. People affected by poor health or disabilities are less likely to cast a ballot than the general population, and as a result, have less sway over who gets to be in power and what policies are made.

When previously disenfranchised people, including people with disabilities, vote, policies that benefit everyone and better health outcomes follow, according to County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a program of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

About 42.5 million Americans have disabilities, according to 2021 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. A disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or interact with the world around them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the November 2020 election, individuals with disabilities voted at a 7% lower rate than people without disabilities, according to the Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2020 Elections survey by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and Rutgers University. More than 11% — nearly 2 million people with disabilities — said they faced difficulties voting.

Voters with disabilities face a range of barriers, including inaccessible voting places, lack of accessible voting machines, and state laws that restrict voting by mail or criminalize assisting a person in voting, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

When the Government Accountability Office officials visited 167 polling places during the 2016 general election, only 17% were fully accessible for people with disabilities who wanted to vote in person. The most common barriers were steep ramps, lack of signs for accessible paths to the building, gravel parking lots or lack of parking options.

In 2023, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, which will take effect for the 2024 general election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University. Most of the laws limit mail-in voting, shorten the window of requesting a mail ballot or ban drop boxes. Even though these laws don’t target people with disabilities, they create additional barriers for them.

People who live in institutions like nursing homes, those who are under legal guardianship and people with mental illness are also less likely to vote than the general population, research has shown. In some cases, these people are prohibited from voting by state law.

Several states bar individuals under guardianship or conservatorship from voting, according to a 2022 study published in the Election Law Journal.

“Out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, 35 have constitutional provisions that specifically do not allow mentally incapacitated individuals to vote and thirteen state constitutions are silent on whether an individual with limited capacity can vote. Most states require a court order to disenfranchise individuals with limited capacity either as part of the appointment of a limited guardianship or as part of the voter registration process,” according to a 2022 explainer by the American Bar Association.

Although federal elections are mainly conducted under state laws and policies, several federal laws specifically address accessibility issues for voters with disabilities in states and counties, according to a 2021 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Those provisions are included in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets guidelines for counties and states, has a dedicated page for voting accessibility. And those guidelines can be enforced by the Department of Justice.

Below, we have gathered four studies that examine the relationship between voting in the U.S. and disabilities. The research roundup is followed by several story ideas and interview questions for journalists.

The findings show…

• People with disabilities are less likely to vote than people without disabilities and state laws that restrict voting further limit their ability to vote.
• Voting rates vary depending on the type and level of disability. For instance, people with hearing disability tend to vote at a similar rate as the general population while the voting rate among people with mental disabilities has been shown to be 18% lower than the general population. Also, people with more functional limitations, including difficulty speaking and reading, were less likely to vote than people who didn’t have those challenges.
• Compliance with disability access laws at polling sites is under-enforced. There is no national ADA certification or permitting process to ensure that voting locations are accessible.
• Some states have competency laws that prevent certain groups of people with disabilities from voting, such as people who have legal guardians, even though such arrangements might have nothing to do with the person’s ability to vote. In many states, only a judge may decide whether an individual shouldn’t have the ability to vote.
• People living in nursing homes and assisted living facilities are enthusiastic to vote but face numerous hurdles to cast a ballot.

Research roundup

Disenfranchisement and Voting Opportunity Among People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Sarah Nelson Lineberry and Matthew Bogenschutz. Journal of the Society for Social Work & Research, Winter 2023.

The study: The paper examines predictors of voting among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities who received state-funded disability services in Virginia. The authors used data from the state’s 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 National Core Indicators In-Person Survey — a collaborative project of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disability Services and the Human Service Research Institute. The sample included 1,620 people.

The findings: People with more severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, those with guardians, and those who have not attended advocacy events are less likely to vote than their peers, the study finds. Having a key to one’s home and being able to lock one’s bedroom door were associated with an increased likelihood of voting. Social workers have the opportunity to help increase voting opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the authors write.

In the authors’ words: “Results suggest that people with severe or profound levels of [intellectual and developmental disabilities] have a particularly limited voice in American democracy, which should serve as a call to action for advocates to do more to ensure that voting opportunity the most fundamental of democratic rights — is accessible to all people.”

Also: Voting Rights for Persons with Serious Mental Illnesses in the U.S., published in 2019 in the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal provides a detailed overview of the issues.

Defending Voting Rights in Long-Term Care Institutions
Nina A. Kohn and Casey Smith. Boston University Law Review, 2023.

The study: Nearly 2.2 million Americans live in long-term care facilities in the U.S., including nursing homes and assisted living facilities. There’s a growing consensus among scholars and policymakers that “a person has the cognitive capacity to vote so long as they can somehow express a voting choice,” the authors write. And contrary to common assumptions, most long-term care residents don’t have substantial cognitive disabilities. Researchers reviewed nursing home inspection reports from 2016 to 2021 to better understand barriers to voting.

The findings: The authors’ review of nursing home inspection reports finds evidence that residents are enthusiastic about voting. But they identified more than 100 documented instances of nursing homes violating residents’ voting rights. Long-term care residents face systemic disenfranchisement, including “burdensome election procedures, profound isolation, and widespread failure by facilities to provide required assistance prevent long-term care residents from voting,” they write.

In the authors’ words: “Indeed, even a few, targeted cases defending the voting rights of long-term care residents could undermine the harmful assumption that this population does not have the ability to vote and that their voting rights are — as some states suggested amid the COVID-19 pandemic — ‘non-essential.’”

Designing Accessible Elections: Recommendations from Disability Voting Rights Advocates
Ihaab Syed, et al. Election Law Journal, March 2022.

The study: The article analyzes some of the main reasons why barriers to voting for people with disabilities persist and offers insights into how local and state election officials can improve election policies, practices and procedures.

The findings: One of the main reasons for voting inaccessibility is a complex and decentralized system of administering elections. Laws are under-enforced and there’s a failure to ask for the perspective, preferences and needs of people with disabilities. Most states don’t have a deadline for counties to designate polling places, let alone require an audit of the site for accessibility. The DOJ, which has the authority to issue regulations and litigate actions, has not been very active, researchers write. Also, policymakers must account for the fact that some people with disabilities will prefer or need to receive in-person assistance, and electoral policies must not interfere with their ability to get assistance from the person of their choice, they write.

In the authors’ words: “In closing, we urge election officials (and policymakers at all levels of government) to take seriously a slogan that has become a powerful rallying cry in the disability rights movement: ‘Nothing about us without us.’”

Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2020 Elections: Final Report on Survey Results Submitted to the Election Assistance Commission
Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse. February 2021.

The study: This paper is based on a nationally representative survey of 2,569 U.S. participants: 1,782 with disabilities and 787 without disabilities. The survey was conducted by SSRS, a well-established survey firm.

The findings: The 52-page report is filled with data, but here are some highlights.

• People with disabilities are more likely to be older and non-married, less likely to have high school or college degrees, and less likely to be Hispanic or Latino, compared with people without disabilities.
• The incidence of voting difficulties for people with disabilities dropped markedly, from 26.1% in 2012 to 11.4% in 2020. However, the overall rate of difficulties for voters with disabilities in 2020 was almost twice the rate for voters without disabilities (11% compared to 6%).
• 30% of people with cognitive impairment and 24% of people with vision impairment reported difficulty in voting at a polling place, compared with 9.8% of people without a disability.
• Mobility limitations were most common (48%) among people with disabilities, followed by cognitive (24%), hearing (18%), and vision (12%) impairments. (Some respondents fell into more than one category.)
• 49% of people with disabilities voted at a polling place or election office in 2020, compared with 56% of voters without disabilities.
• 55% of people with disabilities, including those with mobility limitations and those needing help with daily activities used mail ballots, compared with 44% of voters without disabilities.
• 74% of people with disabilities used early voting and voting by mail, compared with 69% of voters without disabilities.
• 53% of people with disabilities said they follow politics most of the time, compared with 42% of people without disabilities.

In the authors’ words: “The results show significant progress has been made in voting accessibility since 2012. This reflects well on the efforts of the EAC, election officials, policy-makers, and disability organizations. Nevertheless, voters with disabilities remain significantly more likely than those without disabilities to experience voting difficulties, indicating that more work needs to be done to improve accessibility.”

Also: The authors conducted another survey during the November 2022 elections, finding comparable results to 2020 but better accessibility than in 2012.

Disability and Election Administration in the United States: Barriers and Improvements
April A. Johnson and Sierra Powell. Policy Studies, November 2019.

The study: The authors examine whether lower voter turnout among people with disabilities is directly related to voting procedures, including voter registration, voter identification regulations and methods of ballot submission. They analyzed data from the 2012 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 50,000 Americans conducted by polling firm YouGov before and after presidential and midterm elections.

The findings: Overall, 30% of people with disabilities in 2016, and 37% of people with disabilities in 2012 specifically cited “disability or illness” as the main reason why they did not vote. Registering oneself to vote was a substantial barrier for people with disabilities. Also, voting by mail, instead of early voting or same-day registration, may be more inclusive for people with disabilities.

In the authors’ words: “One of the most disturbing discoveries presented here is that election administration also affects one’s psychological state. Electoral systems which impose or magnify perceptions of intimidation at the polls among any group of persons should garner both serious attention and pointed remedies,” the authors write. “We agree and believe that poll workers may benefit from more specialized training, specifically with regard to accommodations for those with cognitive, physical, or emotional limitations. Such administrative efforts may serve to reduce the ‘chilling effect’ of perceived hostile voting conditions.”

Suggested story ideas and interview questions

• Are your area’s polling places accessible to people with disabilities? To start, read GAO’s 2021 and 2017 reports to understand barriers, laws and solutions. The U.S. Department of Justice has an accessibility checklist for polling places. Also, the National Institute of Standards and Technology within the Department of Commerce examines technological barriers to the voting process for people with disabilities.
• Ask your local election officials how they are making voting places more accessible to people with disabilities. Do they have data on what percentage of polling places are fully accessible and how that rate has changed over time?
• Speak with advocacy groups and disability rights activists about barriers to voting in your state and county.
• What barriers do people in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other institutions face in voting in your state or county? The National Disability Rights Network has a helpful explainer to get you started.
• What are your state’s voting laws for people under guardianship? Start with this 2022 explainer from the American Bar Association and this 2023 report by the National Disability Rights Network. This 2018 guide for voters with mental disabilities by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law also explains the basics.
• Are your area nursing homes assisting their residents who want to vote? You may be able to find past violations in nursing home inspection reports.
• Also, don’t forget to use proper style. The National Center on Disability and Journalism has a language style guide. The Arc, an advocacy organization for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities has a Journalist’s Guide to Disability for Election 2024.

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This year, more than 60 countries, representing more than 4 billion people, will hold major elections. News headlines already are reporting that voters are hanging on to hope. When things get tough or don’t go our way, we’re told to hang on to hope. HOPE was the only word printed on President Barack Obama’s iconic campaign poster in 2008.

Research on hope has flourished only in recent decades. There’s now a growing recognition that hope has a role in physical, social, and mental health outcomes, including promoting resilience. As we embark on a challenging year of news, it’s important for journalists to learn about hope.

So what is hope? And what does the research say about it?

Merriam-Webster defines hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.” This definition highlights the two basic dimensions of hope: a desire and a belief in the possibility of attaining that desire.

Hope is not Pollyannaish optimism, writes psychologist Everett Worthington in a 2020 article for The Conversation. “Instead, hope is a motivation to persevere toward a goal or end state, even if we’re skeptical that a positive outcome is likely.”

There are several scientific theories about hope.

One of the first, and most well-known, theories on hope was introduced in 1991 by American psychologist Charles R. Snyder.

In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Snyder defined hope as a cognitive trait centered on the pursuit of goals and built on two components: a sense of agency in achieving a goal, and a perceived ability to create pathways to achieve that goal. He defined hope as something individualistic.

Snyder also introduced the Hope Scale, which continues to be used today, as a way to measure hope. He suggested that some people have higher levels of hope than others and there seem to be benefits to being more hopeful.

“For example, we would expect that higher as compared with lower hope people are more likely to have a healthy lifestyle, to avoid life crises, and to cope better with stressors when they are encountered,” they write.

Others have suggested broader definitions.

In 1992, Kaye Herth, a professor of nursing and a scholar on hope, defined hope as “a multidimensional dynamic life force characterized by a confident yet uncertain expectation of achieving good, which to the hoping person, is realistically possible and personally significant.” Herth also developed the Herth Hope Index, which is used in various settings, including clinical practice and research.

More recently, others have offered an even broader definition of hope.

Anthony Scioli, a clinical psychologist and author of several books on hope, defines hope “as an emotion with spiritual dimensions,” in a 2023 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology. “Hope is best viewed as an ameliorating emotion, designed to fill the liminal space between need and reality.”

Hope is also nuanced.

“Our hopes may be active or passive, patient or critical, private or collective, grounded in the evidence or resolute in spite of it, socially conservative or socially transformative,” writes Darren Webb in a 2007 study published in History of the Human Sciences. “We all hope, but we experience this most human of all mental feelings in a variety of modes.”

To be sure, a few studies have shown that hope can have negative outcomes in certain populations and situations. For example, one study highlighted in the research roundup below finds that Black college students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with Black students who had lower levels of hope.

Today, hope is one of the most well-studied constructs within the field of positive psychology, according to the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, which dedicated its August 2023 issue to the subject. (Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused on characters and behaviors that allow people to flourish.)

We’ve gathered several studies below to help you think more deeply about hope and recognize its role in your everyday lives.

Research roundup

The Role of Hope in Subsequent Health and Well-Being For Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach
Katelyn N.G. Long, et al. Global Epidemiology, November 2020.

The study: To explore the potential public health implications of hope, researchers examine the relationship between hope and physical, behavioral and psychosocial outcomes in 12,998 older adults in the U.S. with a mean age of 66.

Researchers note that most investigations on hope have focused on psychological and social well-being outcomes and less attention has been paid to its impact on physical and behavioral health, particularly among older adults.

The findings: Results show a positive association between an increased sense of hope and a variety of behavioral and psychosocial outcomes, such as fewer sleep problems, more physical activity, optimism and satisfaction with life. However, there wasn’t a clear association between hope and all physical health outcomes. For instance, hope was associated with a reduced number of chronic conditions, but not with stroke, diabetes and hypertension.

The takeaway: “The later stages of life are often defined by loss: the loss of health, loved ones, social support networks, independence, and (eventually) loss of life itself,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that standard public health promotion activities, which often focus solely on physical health, might be expanded to include a wider range of factors that may lead to gains in hope. For example, alongside community-based health and nutrition programs aimed at reducing chronic conditions like hypertension, programs that help strengthen marital relations (e.g., closeness with a spouse), provide opportunities to volunteer, help lower anxiety, or increase connection with friends may potentially increase levels of hope, which in turn, may improve levels of health and well-being in a variety of domains.”

Associated Factors of Hope in Cancer Patients During Treatment: A Systematic Literature Review
Corine Nierop-van Baalen, Maria Grypdonck, Ann van Hecke and Sofie Verhaeghe. Journal of Advanced Nursing, March 2020.

The study: The authors review 33 studies, written in English or Dutch and published in the past decade, on the relationship between hope and the quality of life and well-being of patients with cancer. Studies have shown that many cancer patients respond to their diagnosis by nurturing hope, while many health professionals feel uneasy when patients’ hopes go far beyond their prognosis, the authors write.

The findings: Quality of life, social support and spiritual well-being were positively associated with hope, as measured with various scales. Whereas symptoms, psychological distress and depression had a negative association with hope. Hope didn’t seem to be affected by the type or stage of cancer or the patient’s demographics.

The takeaway: “Hope seems to be a process that is determined by a person’s inner being rather than influenced from the outside,” the authors write. “These factors are typically given meaning by the patients themselves. Social support, for example, is not about how many patients experience support, but that this support has real meaning for them.”

Characterizing Hope: An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Characteristics of Hope
Emma Pleeging, Job van Exel and Martijn Burger. Applied Research in Quality of Life, September 2021.

The study: This systematic review provides an overview of the concept of hope based on 66 academic papers in ten academic fields, including economics and business studies, environmental studies, health studies, history, humanities, philosophy, political science, psychology, social science, theology and youth studies, resulting in seven themes and 41 sub-themes.

The findings: The authors boil down their findings to seven components: internal and external sources, the individual and social experience of hope, internal and external effects, and the object of hope, which can be “just about anything we can imagine,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “An important implication of these results lies in the way hope is measured in applied and scientific research,” researchers write. “When measuring hope or developing instruments to measure it, researchers could be well-advised to take note of the broader understanding of the topic, to prevent that important characteristics might be overlooked.”

Revisiting the Paradox of Hope: The Role of Discrimination Among First-Year Black College Students
Ryon C. McDermott, et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology, March 2020.

The study: Researchers examine the moderating effects of hope on the association between experiencing racial discrimination, stress and academic well-being among 203 first-year U.S. Black college students. They build on a small body of evidence that suggests high levels of hope might have a negative effect on Black college students who experience racial discrimination.

The authors use data gathered as part of an annual paper-and-pencil survey of first-year college students at a university on the Gulf Coast, which the study doesn’t identify.

The findings: Researchers find that Black students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with students who had lower levels of hope. On the other hand, Black students with low levels of hope may be less likely to experience stress when they encounter discrimination.

Meanwhile, Black students who had high levels of hope were more successful in academic integration — which researchers define as satisfaction with and integration into the academic aspects of college life — despite facing discrimination. But low levels of hope had a negative impact on students’ academic well-being.

“The present study found evidence that a core construct in positive psychology, hope, may not always protect Black students from experiencing the psychological sting of discrimination, but it was still beneficial to their academic well-being,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “Our findings also highlight an urgent need to reduce discrimination on college campuses,” the researchers write. “Reducing discrimination could help Black students (and other racial minorities) avoid additional stress, as well as help them realize the full psychological and academic benefits of having high levels of hope.”

Additional reading

Hope Across Cultural Groups Lisa M. Edwards and Kat McConnell. Current Opinion in Psychology, February 2023.

The Psychology of Hope: A Diagnostic and Prescriptive Account Anthony Scioli. “Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope,” July 2020.

Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind C.R. Snyder. Psychological Inquiry, 2002

The post Hope: A research-based explainer appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

This collection of research on horse race reporting, originally published in September 2019 and periodically updated, was last updated on Oct. 23, 2023 with recent research on third-party political candidates, probabilistic forecasting and TV news coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

When journalists covering elections focus primarily on who’s winning or losing instead of policy issues –what’s known as horse race coverage — voters, candidates and the news industry itself suffer, a growing body of research suggests.

Media scholars have studied horse race reporting for decades to better understand the impact of news stories that frame elections as a competitive game, relying heavily on public opinion polls and giving the most positive attention to frontrunners and underdogs who are gaining support. It’s a common strategy for political news coverage in the U.S. and other parts of the globe.

Thomas E. Patterson, professor of government and the press at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, says U.S. election coverage often does not delve into policy issues and candidates’ stances on them. In fact, policy issues accounted for 10% of news coverage about the 2016 presidential election that Patterson examines in his December 2016 working paper, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The bulk of the reporting concentrated on who was winning and losing and why.

When he looked at how CBS and Fox News covered the 2020 presidential election in their evening newscasts, he found similar patterns. For example, three-fourths of the stories the CBS Evening News ran on Democratic candidate Joe Biden focused on the horse race, as did a third of its stories about Republican candidate Donald Trump, Patterson writes in his December 2020 working paper, “A Tale of Two Elections: CBS and Fox News’ Portrayal of the 2020 Presidential Campaign.”

In both papers, Patterson notes this type of reporting can help some candidates while hurting others.

“[These reports] tend to be a source of positive news for the candidate who’s ahead in the race, except when that candidate is slipping in the polls,” he writes in his 2020 analysis. “Speculation about the reasons for the decline then drive the story, and there’s nothing positive about that narrative.”

Dozens of academic studies chronicle the dangers of horse race journalism. Scholars find it’s associated with:

• Distrust in politicians.
• Distrust of news outlets.
• An uninformed electorate.
• Inaccurate reporting of opinion poll data.

Studies also indicate horse race reporting can:

• Shortchange female candidates, who tend to focus on policy issues to build their credibility.
• Give novel or unusual candidates an edge.
• Hurt third-party candidates, who often are overlooked or ignored by newsrooms because their chances of winning are usually quite slim compared with Republican and Democratic candidates.

In recent years, scholars have begun investigating the impact of a relatively new type of horse race journalism: probabilistic forecasting. Some newsrooms have the resources and expertise to conduct sophisticated analyses of data collected from multiple opinion polls to more precisely predict candidates’ chances of winning. This allows news outlets to present polling data as the percentage likelihood that one candidate will win over another candidate.

The research to date indicates probabilistic forecasting can confuse voters and possibly lead them to believe an election outcome is more certain than it actually is. Researchers worry that will affect voter turnout — when people doubt their votes will make a difference, many might not bother turning in a ballot.

Part of the problem is some voters misinterpret probabilistic forecasting, researchers explain in a January 2023 study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. They don’t understand the difference between a candidate’s probability of winning and their predicted vote share.

“A vote share of 60% is a landslide win, but a win probability of 60% corresponds to an essentially tied election,” write the researchers, led by Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University.

Research to help journalists understand the pitfalls of horse race reporting

Journalists wanting to know more about the consequences of horse race reporting, keep reading. Below, we’ve gathered and summarized academic studies that examine the topic from various angles. For additional context, we included several studies that look at how journalists use — and sometimes misuse — opinion polls. We’ll update this roundup of research periodically, as new studies are released.

If you need help reporting on polls, please read our tip sheet on questions journalists should ask when covering them and our tip sheet on interpreting margins of error.

Also, because it’s unlikely newsrooms will stop covering elections as a competitive game, we created a tip sheet to help them improve. Check out “‘Horse Race’ Coverage of Elections: What to Avoid and How to Get It Right.”

The consequences of horse race reporting

The Polls and the U.S. Presidential Election in 2020 … and 2024
Arnold Barnett and Arnaud Sarfati.Statistics and Public Policy, May 2023.

This study looks at how accurately FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates opinion polls and publishes news stories about the results, predicted the outcomes of America’s 2020 presidential election. The authors find it “did an excellent job” predicting who would win in each state but underestimated Donald Trump’s vote share by state by a “modest” amount.

Once a standalone news site, FiveThirtyEight, which recently became 538, was incorporated into ABC News’ website after the news organization acquired it in 2018.

The authors note it’s important to gauge how accurately predictions were made because voters’ perceptions of how polls performed in the most recent presidential election can have consequences for the next one. The accuracy of 2024 presidential polls “is already a live issue at the start of 2023,” write the authors, Arnold Barnett, a professor of management science and statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Arnaud Sarfati, a graduate student at MIT at the time the paper was written.

“If such polls — as distilled by a respected aggregator like FiveThirtyEight — are viewed as trustworthy, they could affect the intensity of pressure on Joe Biden to retire,” Barnett and Sarfati write. “They could influence Republican voters in state primaries who wonder whether Donald Trump could plausibly win reelection. The potential candidacies of Democrats like Amy Klobuchar or Republicans like Ron DeSantis could rise or fall with their standings in voter surveys.”

The analysis finds FiveThirtyEight underestimated Trump’s vote share in each state by an average of 1.90 percentage points. Trump outperformed FiveThirtyEight’s estimates in both heavily Democratic states and heavily Republican states.

Barnett and Sarfati write that “it is concerning that, for the second election in a row, the polls underestimated the support for Donald Trump and FiveThirtyEight did not devise an appropriate adjustment for the downward bias.”

A possible reason for the shortfall, according to the authors: Trump supporters might have been more likely to refuse to participate in voter surveys than Trump opponents. 

“While one hopes that lessons from 2020 will avoid the problem in 2024, there is no certainty that this will be the case,” Barnett and Sarfati write.

Information, Incentives, and Goals in Election Forecasts
Andrew Gelman, Jessica Hullman, Christopher Wlezien and George Elliott Morris. Judgment and Decision Making, January 2023.

In this paper, scholars offer a highly technical analysis of probabilistic forecasts of elections in the U.S. and how they are communicated to the public. They also make recommendations aimed at helping the public understand how these forecasts are made and how results should be interpreted.

The scholars point out that “forecasters have some responsibility to take into account what readers may do with a visualization or statement of forecast predictions.” They suggest researchers and news outlets work together to figure out the best ways to present this information to the public.

“Designing a forecast without any thought to how it may play into readers’ decisions seems both impractical and potentially unethical,” write the four researchers: Gelman, of Columbia University; Jessica Hullman, an associate professor of computer science at Northwestern University; Christopher Wlezien, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin; and George Elliott Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News.

“In general, we think that more collaboration between researchers invested in empirical questions around uncertainty communication and journalists developing forecast models and their displays would be valuable,” they add.

The authors suggest researchers and journalists work together to improve election predictions and news outlets’ methods of communicating results. If that information is well presented and explained, the public’s ability to interpret forecasts correctly could develop over time, they write.

“Naturally, adding too much information risks overwhelming readers,” they add. “The majority spend only a few minutes on the websites, and may feel overwhelmed by concepts such as correlation that forecasters will view as both simple and important, but are largely beside the point of the overall narrative of the forecast. Still, increasing readers’ literacy about model assumptions could happen in baby steps: a reference to a model assumption in an explanatory annotation on a high level graph, or a few bullets at the top of a forecast display describing information sources to whet a reader’s appetite.”

Third-Party Candidates, Newspaper Editorials, and Political Debates
John F. Kirch. Newspaper Research Journal, May 2022.

News outlets exclude or limit coverage of third-party political candidates, even when those candidates are legitimate contenders, suggests this analysis of editorials in the Washington Post and 12 other newspapers that report on Virginia politics.

When Towson University journalism professor John Kirch looked at how these newspapers’ editorial staff characterized candidates in the 2013 gubernatorial race in Virginia, he discovered they often excluded Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. He was mentioned in 28.8% of all editorials that ran between Sept. 4, 2013 and Nov. 6, 2013. The Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, appeared in 91.9% of editorials and the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, appeared in 73.9%.

The Washington Post did not mention Sarvis at all during that period.

Kirch writes that Virginia’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign makes for a good case study because Sarvis was a candidate with strong academic and professional credentials who had run as a Republican for a state senate seat in 2011.

“He ran against two highly unpopular major-party candidates, whose approval ratings were below 50% for most of the campaign,” Kirch writes. “And Sarvis was a serious candidate, which is defined in this study as one who received at least 5% support in the polls, the threshold used by the federal government to determine whether a candidate is eligible for public financing. If ever there was a gubernatorial campaign in which newspaper editorials would consider endorsing or advocating for a third-party candidate’s inclusion in debates, it is the Virginia race.”

When the newspapers’ editorials did mention Sarvis, they sometimes labeled him as a long shot, a spoiler or a protest vote rather than a serious competitor. They never mentioned his education or career as an economist, mathematician or businessman. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate was identified as the former head of the Democratic Party in 25.6% of the editorials in which he appeared and identified by his occupation as a businessman in 18.3%. The Republican candidate was described as the state’s attorney general in 55.9% of the editorials in which he appeared.

However, one of the 13 newspapers examined endorsed Sarvis for governor — the Register & Bee in Danville, Virgina. Four others advocated for him to be included in the gubernatorial debates while the editorials of nine newspapers ignored his exclusion from the debates.

Kirch blames horse race coverage as “a factor in why minor parties are ignored, with scholarship showing that third-party candidates are left on the sidelines because they rarely meet the metrics the news media use to measure the contest aspects of a campaign, such as fundraising abilities and poll support.”

Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
Sean Jeremy Westwood, Solomon Messing and Yphtach Lelkes. The Journal of Politics, 2020.

This paper examines problems associated with probabilistic forecasting — a type of horse race journalism that has grown more common in recent years. These forecasts “aggregate polling data into a concise probability of winning, providing far more conclusive information about the state of a race,” write authors Sean Jeremy Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, Solomon Messing, a senior engineering manager at Twitter, and Yphtach Lelkes, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers find that probabilistic forecasting discourages voting, likely because people often decide to skip voting when their candidate has a very high chance of winning or losing. They also learned this type of horse race reporting is more prominent in news outlets with left-leaning audiences, including FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times and HuffPost.

Westwood, Messing and Lelkes point out that probabilistic forecasting might have contributed to Clinton’s loss of the 2016 presidential election. They write that “forecasts reported win probabilities between 70% and 99%, giving Clinton an advantage ranging from 20% to 49% beyond 50:50 odds. Clinton ultimately lost by 0.7% in Pennsylvania, 0.2% in Michigan, 0.8% in Wisconsin, and 1.2% in Florida.”

The Consequences of Strategic News Coverage for Democracy: A Meta-Analysis
Alon Zoizner. Communication Research, 2021.

This paper examines what was known about the consequences of horse race journalism at the time it was written. Although the paper first appeared on the Communication Research journal’s website in 2018, it wasn’t published in an issue of the journal until 2021. In the academic article, Alon Zoizner, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, analyzes 32 studies published or released from 1997 to 2016 that examine the effects of “strategic news” coverage. He describes strategic news coverage as the “coverage of politics [that] often focuses on politicians’ strategies and tactics as well as their campaign performance and position at the polls.”

Among the key takeaways: This type of reporting elevates the public’s cynicism toward politics and the issues featured as part of that coverage.

“In other words,” Zoizner writes, “this coverage leads to a specific public perception of politics that is dominated by a focus on political actors’ motivations for gaining power rather than their substantive concerns for the common good.”

He adds that young people, in particular, are susceptible to the effects of strategic news coverage because they have limited experience with the democratic process. They “may develop deep feelings of mistrust toward political elites, which will persist throughout their adult lives,” Zoizner writes.

His analysis also reveals that this kind of reporting results in an uninformed electorate. The public receives less information about public policies and candidates’ positions on important issues.

“This finding erodes the media’s informative value because journalists cultivate a specific knowledge about politics that fosters political alienation rather than helping citizens make rational decisions based on substantive information,” the author writes. Framing politics as a game to be won “inhibits the development of an informed citizenship because the public is mostly familiar with the political rivalries instead of actually knowing what the substantive debate is about.”

Another important discovery: Strategic news coverage hurts news outlets’ reputations. People exposed to it “are more critical of news stories and consider them to be less credible, interesting, and of low quality,” Zoizner explains. “Strategic coverage will continue to be a part of the news diet but in parallel will lead citizens to develop higher levels of cynicism and criticism not only toward politicians but also toward the media.”

News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences
Thomas E. Patterson. Harvard Kennedy School working paper, 2016.

Horse race reporting gave Donald Trump an advantage during the 2016 presidential primary season, this working paper finds. Nearly 60% of the election news analyzed during this period characterized the election as a competitive game, with Trump receiving the most coverage of any candidate seeking the Republican nomination. In the final five weeks of the primary campaign, the press gave him more coverage than Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

“The media’s obsession with Trump during the primaries meant that the Republican race was afforded far more coverage than the Democratic race, even though it lasted five weeks longer,” writes Patterson, who looked at election news coverage provided by eight major print and broadcast outlets over the first five months of 2016. “The Republican contest got 63 percent of the total coverage between January 1 and June 7, compared with the Democrats’ 37 percent — a margin of more than three to two.”

Patterson’s paper takes a detailed look at the proportion and tone of coverage for Republican and Democratic candidates during each stage of the primary campaign. He notes that the structure of the nominating process lends itself to horse race reporting. “Tasked with covering fifty contests crammed into the space of several months,” he writes, “journalists are unable to take their eyes or minds off the horse race or to resist the temptation to build their narratives around the candidates’ position in the race.”

Patterson explains how horse race journalism affects candidates’ images and can influence voter decisions. “The press’s attention to early winners, and its tendency to afford them more positive coverage than their competitors, is not designed to boost their chances, but that’s a predictable effect,” he writes. He points out that a candidate who’s performing well usually is portrayed positively while one who isn’t doing as well “has his or her weakest features put before the public.”

Patterson asserts that primary election coverage is “the inverse of what would work best for voters.” “Most voters don’t truly engage the campaign until the primary election stage,” he writes. “As a result, they enter the campaign nearly at the point of decision, unarmed with anything approaching a clear understanding of their choices. They are greeted by news coverage that’s long on the horse race and short on substance … It’s not until later in the process, when the race is nearly settled, that substance comes more fully into the mix.”

What Predicts the Game Frame? Media Ownership, Electoral Context, and Campaign News
Johanna Dunaway and Regina G. Lawrence. Political Communication, 2015.

Corporate-owned and large-chain newspapers were more likely to publish stories that frame elections as a competitive game than newspapers with a single owner, according to this study. The authors find that horse race coverage was most prevalent in close races and during the weeks leading up to an election.

Researchers Johanna Dunaway, an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, and Regina G. Lawrence, associate dean of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in Portland, looked at print news stories about elections for governor and U.S. Senate in 2004, 2006 and 2008. They analyzed 10,784 articles published by 259 newspapers between Sept. 1 and Election Day of those years.

Their examination reveals that privately-owned, large-chain publications behave similarly to publications controlled by shareholders. “We expected public shareholder-controlled news organizations to be most likely to resort to game-framed news because of their tendency to emphasize the profit motive over other goals; in fact, privately owned large chains are slightly more likely to use the game frame in their campaign news coverage at mean levels of electoral competition,” Dunaway and Lawrence write.

They note that regardless of a news outlet’s ownership structure, journalists and audiences are drawn to the horse race in close races. “Given a close race, newspapers of many types will tend to converge on a game-framed election narrative and, by extension, stories focusing on who’s up/who’s down will crowd out stories about the policy issues they are presumably being elected to address,” the authors write. “And, as the days-’til-election variable shows, this pattern will intensify across the course of a close race.”

Gender Bias and Mainstream Media
Meredith Conroy. Chapter in the book Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency, 2015.

In this book chapter, Meredith Conroy, an associate professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, draws on earlier research that finds horse race coverage is more detrimental to women than men running for elected office. She explains that female candidates often emphasize their issue positions as a campaign strategy to bolster their credibility.

“If the election coverage neglects the issues, women may miss out on the opportunity to assuage fears about their perceived incompetency,” she writes. She adds that when the news “neglects substantive coverage, the focus turns to a focus on personality and appearance.”

“An overemphasis on personality and appearance is detrimental to women, as it further delegitimizes their place in the political realm, more so than for men, whose negative traits are still often masculine and thus still relevant to politics,” she writes.

Contagious Media Effects: How Media Use and Exposure to Game-Framed News Influence Media Trust
David Nicolas Hopmann, Adam Shehata and Jesper Strömbäck. Mass Communication and Society, 2015.

How does framing politics as a strategic game influence the public’s trust in journalism? This study of Swedish news coverage suggests it lowers trust in all forms of print and broadcast news media — except tabloid newspapers.

The authors note that earlier research indicates people who don’t trust mainstream media often turn to tabloids for news. “By framing politics as a strategic game and thereby undermining trust not only in politics but also in the media, the media may thus simultaneously weaken the incentives for people to follow the news in mainstream media and strengthen the incentives for people to turn to alternative news sources,” write the authors, David Nicolas Hopmann, an associate professor at University of Southern Denmark, Adam Shehata, a senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, and Jesper Strömbäck, a professor at the University of Gothenburg.

The three researchers analyzed how four daily newspapers and three daily “newscasts” covered the 2010 Swedish national election campaign. They also looked at the results of surveys aimed at measuring people’s attitudes toward the Swedish news media in the months leading up to and immediately after the 2010 election. The sample comprised 4,760 respondents aged 18 to 74.

Another key takeaway of this study: The researchers discovered that when people read tabloid newspapers, their trust in them grows as does their distrust of the other media. “Taken together, these findings suggest that the mistrust caused by the framing of politics as a strategic game is contagious in two senses,” they write. “For all media except the tabloids, the mistrust toward politicians implied by the framing of politics as a strategic game is extended to the media-making use of this particular framing, whereas in the case of the tabloids, it is extended to other media.”

How journalists use opinion polls

Transforming Stability into Change: How the Media Select and Report Opinion Polls
Erik Gahner Larsen and Zoltán Fazekas. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020.

This paper demonstrates journalists’ difficulty interpreting public opinion polls. It finds news outlets often reported changes in voter intent when no statistically significant change had actually occurred.

The authors write that they examined political news in Denmark because news outlets there provide relatively neutral coverage and don’t have partisan leanings. They looked at news coverage of polls of voter intent conducted by eight polling firms for eight political parties from 2011 to 2015. Their analysis focuses on 4,147 news articles published on the websites of nine newspapers and two national TV companies.

The researchers learned that journalists tended to report on polls they perceived as showing the largest changes in public opinion. Single outlier polls also got a lot of attention. Not only did many news articles erroneously report a change in public opinion, they often quoted politicians reacting as though a change had occurred, potentially misleading audiences further. Journalists also avoided reporting information on the margin of error for the poll results.

In most cases, the news stories should have been about stability in public opinion, note the authors, Erik Gahner Larsen, senior scientific adviser at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, and Zoltán Fazekas, an associate professor of business and politics at Copenhagen Business School.

“However, 58 percent of the articles mention change in their title,” they write. “Furthermore, while 82 percent of the polls have no statistically significant changes, 86 percent of the articles does not mention any considerations related to uncertainty.”

The ‘Nate Silver Effect’ on Political Journalism: Gatecrashers, Gatekeepers, and Changing Newsroom Practices Around Coverage of Public Opinion Polls
Benjamin Toff. Journalism, 2019.

This study, based on in-depth interviews with 41 U.S. journalists, media analysts and public opinion pollsters, documents changes in how news outlets cover public opinion. It reveals, among other things, “evidence of eroding internal newsroom standards about which polls to reference in coverage and how to adjudicate between surveys,” writes the author, Benjamin Toff, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Toff notes that journalists’ focus on polling aggregator websites paired with the growing availability of online survey data has resulted in an overconfidence in polls’ ability to predict election outcomes — what one reporter he interviewed called the “Nate Silver effect.”

Both journalists and polling professionals expressed concern about journalists’ lack of training and their reliance on poll firms’ reputations as evidence of poll quality rather than the poll’s sampling design and other methodological details. Toff, who completed the interviews between October 2014 and May 2015, points out that advocacy organizations can take advantage of the situation to get reporters to unknowingly disseminate their messages.

The study also finds that younger journalists and those who work for online news organizations are less likely to consider it their job to interpret polls for the public. One online journalist, for example, told Toff that readers should help determine the reliability of poll results and that “in a lot of ways Twitter is our ombudsman.”

Toff calls on academic researchers to help improve coverage of public opinion, in part by offering clearer guidance on best practices for news reporting. “The challenge of interpreting public opinion is a collective one,” he writes, “and scholarship which merely chastises journalists for their shortcomings does not offer a productive path forward.”

News Reporting of Opinion Polls: Journalism and Statistical Noise
Yosef Bhatti and Rasmus Tue Pedersen. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 2016.

This paper, which also looks at news coverage of opinion polls in Denmark, finds that Danish journalists don’t do a great job reporting on opinion polls. Most journalists whose work was examined don’t seem to understand how a poll’s margin of error affects its results. Also, they often fail to explain to their audiences the statistical uncertainty of poll results, according to the authors, Yosef Bhatti of Roskilde University and Rasmus Tue Pedersen of the Danish Center for Social Science Research.

The two researchers analyzed the poll coverage provided by seven Danish newspapers before, during and after the 2011 parliamentary election campaign — a 260-day period from May 9, 2011 to Jan. 23, 2012. A total of 1,078 articles were examined.

Bhatti and Pedersen find that journalists often interpreted two poll results as different from each other when, considering the poll’s uncertainty, it actually was unclear whether one result was larger or smaller than the other. “A large share of the interpretations made by the journalists is based on differences in numbers that are so small that they are most likely just statistical noise,” they write.

They note that bad poll reporting might be the result of journalists’ poor statistical skills. But it “may also be driven by journalists’ and editors’ desires for interesting horse race stories,” the authors add. “Hence, the problem may not be a lack of methodological skills but may also be caused by a lack of a genuine adherence to the journalistic norms of reliability and fact-based news. If this is the case, unsubstantiated poll stories may be a more permanent and unavoidable feature of modern horse race coverage.”

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We updated this tip sheet on ‘horse race’ coverage, originally published in April 2022, on Oct. 23, 2023 to include new hyperlinks and other information.

U.S. newsrooms have been amply criticized for years for covering elections as a competitive game, with a focus on who’s winning and losing instead of on candidates’ policy positions. Despite research documenting the various ways so-called “horse race” reporting can hurt voters, candidates and even news outlets themselves, it’s unlikely journalists will stop.

In fact, horse race coverage of elections has grown more common over the years, thanks in part to the dramatic rise in public opinion polls, which allow journalists to track and quantify voter support for specific candidates.

Harvard Kennedy School media scholar Thomas E. Patterson, who has studied election coverage for decades, has warned that news outlets fail their audiences when they prioritize poll results and campaign strategy over discussions about candidate qualifications, leadership styles and policy positions.

Horse race coverage is partly to blame for “the car wreck that was the 2016 election,” Patterson writes in a December 2016 working paper, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.”

“In the 2016 general election, policy issues accounted for 10% of the news coverage — less than a fourth the space given to the horserace,” writes Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

While many scholars and industry leaders argue news outlets should curb or eliminate horse race coverage, some acknowledge they would have fewer concerns if news stories were more accurate. Multiple studies published over the last decade point out problems in the way journalists interpret and report the results of opinion polls.

“We’re not necessarily against horse race journalism, but we should be thinking about, ‘Why does it look the way it does?’ and ‘How can it be improved?” says researcher Erik Gahner Larsen, who studies journalists’ use of opinion polls and co-wrote a book about it, Reporting Public Opinion: How the Media Turns Boring Polls into Biased News, released in 2021.

We asked Patterson and Larsen for their ideas on how newsrooms could improve horse race coverage. Both shared insights and advice on what journalists should avoid and how to get it right.

WHAT TO AVOID: Reporting on any opinion poll you come across.

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Scrutinize and compare opinion polls to gauge their quality. Rely most often on those conducted by reputable pollsters.

Patterson and Larsen urge journalists to pay attention to the details of a poll, including the questions asked, when the poll was conducted, how many people participated and how well that group represents the population as a whole. When comparing polls, keep in mind many factors can lead to differences in results.

For example, the way pollsters word their questions and the order in which they ask them can affect how people respond. Timing also can influence results. Two polls conducted just days or weeks apart can get drastically different results, especially if a significant event altered the public’s opinion or perception about the subject of the polls.

Patterson suggests journalists rely on poll results from firms with a long history of high-quality work and use caution when covering results from entities with less experience and expertise. He identifies these as reputable organizations that conduct national polls in the U.S.: 

• Quinnipiac University Poll
• Monmouth University Polling Institute
• Gallup
• The Harris Poll
• ABC News/The Washington Post
• Siena College Research Institute/The New York Times Upshot

WHAT TO AVOID: Focusing on a single opinion poll — especially outliers — without providing context.

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: When covering an individual poll, put its findings into perspective by noting historic trends and what other recent polls have found. Consider combining poll results and reporting averages to give audiences the most accurate picture of public sentiment.

“Don’t just cover one, but look at the full picture,” Larsen says. “Acknowledge the existence of other opinion polls. How does [this poll] compare to long-term trends?”

He advises against overplaying outliers — polls with results that differ substantially from or even contradict the findings of most other polls. While journalists and audiences might find polls showing major changes more interesting, their findings probably are not reliable and might be a statistical fluke, Larsen explains.

Combining poll results and reporting on averages would offer audiences the best understanding of public opinion at a given point in time. Only some news organizations have the technical expertise to perform such analyses, however.

For journalists who need help calculating weighted averages, Larsen recommends reaching out to a pollster or statistician.

WHAT TO AVOID: Covering poll results without taking into account the poll’s margin of error.

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Learn what a margin of error is and how it relates to polling and poll results. Make sure news stories featuring poll results reflect their margins of error.

The margin of error, typically expressed as a range of numbers, indicates how likely the opinions expressed by people who participated in an opinion poll reflect the opinions of the population as a whole.

When journalists ignore or overlook a poll’s margin of error — the topic of this journalism tip sheet — their coverage often misrepresents the results. One of the most common mistakes journalists make: Reporting that a particular political candidate has more or less voter support than another when, in fact, considering the poll’s margin of error, it’s simply too close to tell.

For example, let’s say a polling firm asks a nationally representative sample of U.S voters whether they would choose Candidate A or Candidate B in an election. Let’s also say 51% of those voters pick Candidate A and 49% select Candidate B and the poll’s margin of error is 4%. Many journalists would report that most voters prefer Candidate A or that Candidate A has the lead, neither of which is correct.

The correct interpretation of this poll: If this polling firm had asked the same question of every registered voter in the U.S., the actual share of all voters who prefer Candidate A likely falls somewhere between 47% to 55% and the actual percentage preferring Candidate B likely ranges between 45% and 53%. In this case, journalists should report that it’s unclear which candidate has greater support. It’s also accurate to say the two candidates are “statistically tied.”

When Larsen and a fellow researcher studied news coverage of polls in Denmark, they learned that journalists there tended to focus on polls they perceived as showing the biggest changes. In the resulting paper, published in 2020, Larsen and his colleague note that most of the 4,147 print and TV news stories they reviewed had erroneous descriptions of differences in poll results.

Often, journalists reported changes in poll results when no change actually occurred, says Larsen, senior scientific adviser at the Conflict Analysis Research Centre at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

He encourages journalists to ask experts for help describing poll results.

“I think that it’s good advice to say go to political scientists and experts and statisticians — when in doubt, its good to reach out to professionals,” he says. “It can easily be complicated stuff.”

WHAT TO AVOID: Assuming that simply cutting coverage of opinion polls will improve election news and lead to a more informed electorate.

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT: Recognize that horse race reporting takes several forms and audiences seek it out because they’re drawn to competitions. Make horse race coverage more valuable by incorporating information voters need to make their choices.

National election coverage focuses heavily on opinion polls, but at the state and local level, polling is far less common. In those races, journalists use other methods to measure public support and answer the ever-present questions “Who’s winning?” and “Who’s losing?”

One way they do that is by monitoring candidates’ fundraising activities and periodically comparing how much money they have raised and spent. Another way to gauge who’s ahead: Tracking candidates’ success in drawing support from influential community leaders, legislators and groups such as teacher unions and law enforcement associations.

In some parts of the U.S., local organizations hold straw polls, either online or at in-person events, to get a sense of who voters favor. Local newsrooms sometimes report the results of these informal vote tallies.

Over the years, journalism organizations such as the Poynter Institute and industry critics such as New York Magazine columnist Ed Kilgore and pollster Mark Blumenthal have offered ideas for improving horse race journalism in its various forms.

Blumenthal, the former senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, suggests news outlets incorporate coverage of candidates’ qualifications and policy proposals into their horse race coverage.

The reason audiences seek out horse race stories is because they find them more interesting than stories summarizing candidates’ issue positions, he writes in a piece published by NBC News. He adds that journalists should “use the drama of the horse race to draw readers into coverage that connects campaign strategies to the underlying contrasts (on issues, qualifications, leadership styles) between the candidates.”

“If a story attracts readers or viewers interested in ‘who is going to win,’ how well does that story highlight the debate between the candidates?” Blumenthal writes. “How well does it use the tools of its particular medium (hyperlinks, sidebars or on-air references to Web site URLs) to promote stories or resources that give uncertain voters ‘what they need to know’ to make better decisions?”

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar and writing instructor at Poynter, has recommended political journalists look to their colleagues who cover sports for ideas on how to revamp horse race reporting.

In “In Defense of the Horse Race,” published on Poynter’s website in 2008, Clark praises The Boston Globe’s Super Bowl coverage, pointing out that football fans interact energetically with the Globe’s website. It offers traditional coverage of the game event as well as opportunities for audience members to share opinions and engage with one another.

“What if we imagined the coverage of Super Tuesday the way we experience the Super Bowl?,” Clark asks.

He writes that journalists could use horse race coverage to grab audiences’ attention and direct them toward more in-depth coverage.

“If the contest is taut, competitive and exciting, we’ll sit riveted to find out what will happen next,” he writes.

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We updated this piece on ballot measures, originally published in October 2022, to include new figures, two recent research studies and other information.

When U.S. voters go to the polls in November, many will face two types of decisions: Selecting elected officials and choosing whether to support or reject individual ballot measures.

In most states, voters get a direct say in how they are governed by voting on ballot measures — proposals to enact or repeal certain laws or policies, or amend a state constitution.

In 2023, voters in eight states will decide on a total of 41 ballot measures addressing a range of policy topics, including marijuana legalization, abortion, farming and property tax exemptions, according to Ballotpedia, a nonprofit organization that tracks election and policy issues across the U.S.

This year, as in prior years, advocacy groups will spend tons of money trying to persuade voters to say “yes” or “no” to changes that can have a substantial impact on the everyday lives of people who work, live or attend school in a particular state, county or city. As of Sept. 18, campaigns promoting and opposing Ohio Issue 1, an abortion-related ballot question, had raised $27.1 million to fund their efforts, Ballotpedia reports.

But many factors beyond campaign ads and fiery policy debates can influence voters’ choices. It’s important for journalists covering ballot measures, also called ballot propositions, to understand which factors can push voters in one direction over another and why.

To help, we’ve gathered and summarized academic studies that investigate these issues. Their findings suggest:

• When voters enter their polling place, many will not know much, if anything, about the ballot measures they encounter.
• The way ballot questions are worded and framed affects how voters respond to them.
• If ballots are lengthy or ballot measures appear near the bottom, some voters will not vote on ballot measures.
• There’s a link between the types of students who attend local public schools and the level of support voters give tax referendums for public schools.
• It’s easier to persuade voters to choose “no.”
• Local newspapers play a key role in helping voters decide on ballot measures and getting them to finish filling out their ballots. 

Keep reading to learn more. We plan to add studies to this list as new ones become available.

It’s important to note that scholars, government officials and others use several terms to refer to proposals placed on ballots for voters’ approval or rejection. “Ballot measure” is an umbrella term that applies to all types of ballot proposals. The Initiative & Referendum Institute, housed at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, discusses the various terms in this brief explainer.

It’s also worth pointing out that voters typically vote “yes” or “no” on ballot measures. Sometimes, though, they are offered more than two choices. For example, a voter might be prompted to decide between two proposed laws or pick “neither,” according to John Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative & Referendum Institute.

Influencing voter choices

Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections
Hillary C. Shulman; et al. Political Communication, June 2022.

When voters have little to no information about a ballot initiative, they’re more likely to say “yes” when it’s written in simple, easy-to-understand language, this study of 240 registered voters in Ohio indicates. Likewise, when voters have difficulty understanding a ballot question written with uncommon words and jargon, they tend to vote “no” — or not vote at all.

In this paper, researchers focus specifically on what they call “low salience” ballot initiatives, those that received little news coverage and for which no campaign fundraising was done. They conducted two experiments in which participants sat in a quiet room with a computer, which they used to read and vote on ballot initiatives taken from actual ballots in previous elections in other states.

In the first experiment, participants read and voted on 40 ballot initiatives from 21 states. To try to replicate their results, they conducted a second experiment using different ballots — 24 from 11 states.

The researchers write that the results of both experiments provide “support for the notion that ballots written with more frequently used words (i.e., easier) compelled an easier experience that led to a higher likelihood of ballot support.”

They note that when they compared participants’ votes with real-life votes on the ballot measures, they saw similar patterns. Of the 40 ballot measures tested in the first part of the study, 85% passed in both the experimental “election” and the real-world election. Meanwhile, 87.5% of the 24 ballots used in the second experiment were approved in both.

School Characteristics and Voting: What Matters in Turnout and Passage
Karin E. Kitchens. Urban Affairs Review, August 2022.

In Florida, there’s a link between the types of students who attend local public schools and the level of support voters give tax referendums aimed at raising money for public schools, according to this study.

“The percent of students who pass third-grade math in a [voting] precinct is associated with higher passage rates,” the author writes.

During primary elections specifically, voters are less likely to say “yes” to tax referendums in communities where a larger proportion of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school.

To better understand the factors that influence voter support for tax referendums for schools, the author analyzed a variety of data on elections, registered voters, and public and private schools in Florida from 2008 to 2018. During that time, public school districts asked voters 125 times for permission to either raise local tax rates or introduce new taxes to generate more funding for public schools. Ninety-five referendums passed.

The author learned that voter demographics also affect the odds someone will support or reject a referendum. For example, referendums received less support in communities with a lot of older voters or voters who own their homes.

“Because the majority of tax referendum votes are for property tax increases, this shows that the people that are most likely to be affected by the tax increase are less likely to support it,” she writes. “However, the higher household median income is associated with an increase in the percent yes vote.”

Ballot Initiatives and Status Quo Bias
Joshua J. Dyck and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, January 2021.

It’s easier to encourage voters to vote “no” than “yes” on ballot initiatives, this study suggests.

The researchers used two survey experiments to test the effectiveness of arguments made by campaigns urging voters to either support or reject certain ballot initiatives. For the first experiment, researchers conducted telephone surveys with 956 Massachusetts voters one week before the 2012 general election to ask them about three ballot initiatives they would be voting on. For the second experiment, conducted in May 2013, researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults about three hypothetical ballot initiatives.

Participants considered a total of six issues: second trimester abortions, medical use of marijuana, sex offender residency restrictions, assisted suicide, automotive repair laws and a supermajority state budget requirement.

In both experiments, participants were divided into three groups, each of which answered questions about three ballot initiatives. One group was cued with a short argument in favor of the ballot initiative. One was cued with a short argument in opposition to the initiative. Members of the third group — the control group — received no cues and were simply asked if they would support or oppose the measure.

The researchers discovered that cues against a measure were more effective than cues in favor of a measure. For example, U.S. adults cued to oppose a ballot question on second trimester abortion were 9.8% more likely to oppose the measure than adults in the control group. Meanwhile, U.S. adults cued to support the ballot question were less than 1% more likely to say “yes” to it than adults in the control group.

The results indicate opposition cues are most effective at moving people to oppose issues that require relatively high levels of political sophistication, education or effort to understand – for example, whether a supermajority of legislators should be required to make budgetary changes. U.S. adults cued to oppose a hypothetical ballot question about that issue were 20.2% more likely to say they would vote “no” than were members of the control group.

“Across all six issues and in both surveys, opposition cues decrease support for ballot measures from about 9 to 24 percentage points,” the authors write.

Extra, Extra, (Don’t) Roll-off about It! Newspaper Endorsements for Ballot Measures
Kevin Fahey, Carol S. Weissert and Matthew J. Uttermark. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, March 2018.

This 20-year study of ballot measures in Florida finds a link between local newspaper endorsements of specific ballot measure and a lower percentage of voters saying “no” to them.

Researchers collected county-level data on voting decisions on the 79 state constitutional amendments that appeared on general election ballots in Florida between 1994 and 2014. They also looked at whether and how newspapers in different parts of the state encouraged audiences to vote on each ballot measure.

The authors of the paper find that newspaper endorsements are associated with a 4.4% decline in “no” votes. Even a small reduction can make a big difference in Florida elections.

“As the average amendment receives 58% of the vote, an endorsement can be critical in helping push the amendment over the 60% requirement for passage,” the authors explain.

Voter Experience and Ballot Language Framing Effects: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
Ted D. Rossier. Social Science Quarterly, November 2021.

This small study demonstrates that the way ballot measures are worded and framed can affect how voters respond to them.

In an online experiment, 502 adults eligible to vote in the U.S. read hypothetical ballot measures and then indicated whether they would support them. The researcher recruited participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace many scholars use to find people for surveys and studies.

For the first part of the experiment, conducted in November 2016, each participant read one of two versions of a ballot measure calling for a tax increase to fund public education. People were almost twice as likely to support the increase when it was described as an additional “one cent per dollar” than when it was described as “a 22 percent increase,” the author of the paper found. The first version drew support from 60% of participants who read it. One-third of those who read the second version said they would vote for it.

For the second part of the experiment, participants read two hypothetical ballot measures on issues related to public money or property being used for the benefit of religion or religious organizations. The key difference: One measure focused on the removal of something — a Ten Commandments monument from the State Capitol — while the other called for something to be provided — tuition vouchers that low-income students could use to attend private, religious schools.

Participants were more likely to support the measure on school tuition vouchers — 43% of those who read it supported it. Meanwhile, 38% of adults who read the other measure said they would vote “yes.”

The author notes how important it is for authorities to understand how the language and framing of ballot measures can be used to draw or discourage support.

“As a general matter, state institutions that are responsible for writing ballot questions, as well as the courts that hear challenges thereto, must remain mindful of the potential for nefarious manipulation of the process,” he writes.

What voters know about ballot initiatives

Direct Democracy, Educative Effects, and the (Mis)Measurement of Ballot Measure Awareness
Jay Barth, Craig M. Burnett and Janine Parry. Political Behavior, 2020.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether traditional methods of measuring voters’ knowledge of ballot measures — primarily asking them “yes” or “no” questions — have been accurate. The researchers conclude these methods vastly overestimate voter knowledge.

They found most Arkansas voters who participated in survey experiments during two election years could not demonstrate familiarity with any of the ballot measures they would be voting on — even though the election was days away and some measures addressed high-profile issues such as gambling and increasing the minimum wage.

“Indeed, the results of our simple experiments suggest that only about 1 in 4 voters is conscious of even one measure on an upcoming ballot,” the researchers write.

Researchers conducted two statewide surveys of Arkansas voters in 2014 and 2016, one or two weeks before November elections. To gauge how familiar voters were with the ballot measures that would be coming before them, live callers conducted phone interviews with more than 1,500 adults, 75% of whom said they were “very likely” to participate in the upcoming election.

Half of participants were interviewed before Arkansas’s 2014 general election, which included five ballot questions. Half were interviewed prior to the 2016 general election, when Arkansas voters decided four ballot questions.

Among the key findings:

• In 2014, 54% of survey participants said they were unaware any measure would be on the ballot for the upcoming election. In 2016, 53% did not expect ballot measures.
• Half the people who knew ballot measures would appear on their ballots could not identify any of the issues.
• The voters most likely to overstate their level of knowledge about ballot measures were well educated, say they closely follow government and politics, and show a high level of knowledge about federal governance.

The researchers explain why they think earlier methods of measuring voter knowledge failed to accurately capture voter knowledge of ballot measures.

“We suspect that when asked by past researchers if they had ‘read or heard about Proposition X,’ most voters said ‘yes’ not because a robust policy discussion brought the matter to their attention, but because affectively ‘yes’ is the correct answer,” they write.

Insights on why voters skip parts of their ballot

Ballot Position, Choice Fatigue, and Voter Behaviour
Ned Augenblick and Scott Nicholson. The Review of Economic Studies, April 2016.

If ballot measures had appeared at the top of election ballots in San Diego County, California instead of at the bottom, 24 measures that failed between 1992 and 2002 would have passed, according to this analysis. Ballot measures, called propositions in California, appeared below 27 other items, on average.

Researchers examined voter behavior across San Diego County for all primary and general elections during that period. They chose that region because ballot positioning varied considerably among voting precincts thanks to differences in the number of local, state and federal political races and local and state ballot measures.

They found voters often did not finish long ballots, with many skipping races and measures appearing at the bottom.

“We find that voters are more likely to abstain and more likely to rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first candidate listed in a race, as the ballot position of a contest falls,” the authors write.

The share of voters who said “no” to ballot measures would have been 3.2 percentage points lower, on average, if the measures had appeared at the top of ballots, they conclude.

“Therefore, given the ballot position of each proposition, we calculate that 24 (6%) of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed if voters did not experience choice fatigue,” they write.

Local newspapers and voter behavior

Newspapers and Political Participation: The Relationship Between Ballot Rolloff and Local Newspaper Circulation
Christopher Chapp and Peter Aehl. Newspaper Research Journal, May 2021.

This study suggests voters living in U.S. communities with a local newspaper complete a greater portion of their ballots. When researchers examined nationwide voting patterns, they discovered that in areas where the per capita newspaper circulation rate was higher, a larger percentage of voters voted in both the presidential race, located at the top of the ballot, and state legislative races, which are located farther down the ballot.

For the analysis, researchers merged data on the circulation and location of 8,000 local newspapers with results from the 2016 general election aggregated by legislative district.

They found people completed more of their ballots in areas with higher circulation rates, regardless of whether the newspaper published daily or weekly. They found the relationship to be particularly acute in areas where legislative races were less competitive, “suggesting that local news is an especially valuable information source when campaign activity is less pronounced.”

Additional resources

• Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California studies ballot measures. It also maintains several databases of ballot measures. To access the data, contact the institute’s executive director, John Matsusaka.
• The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a Statewide Ballot Measures Database, searchable by state, topic, keyword, year, status or primary sponsor.
• Ballotpedia provides a variety of information on ballot measure trends and individual ballot measures, including campaign fundraising totals, ballot readability scores and links to analyses and polls conducted on individual measures.
• The nonprofit research organization OpenSecrets tracks fundraising by campaigns supporting or opposing statewide ballot measures.

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If you’re preparing for midterm elections in the U.S. on Tuesday, please keep in mind the various resources we’ve created to help journalists cover local and national elections. We’ve got tip sheets, explainers and research roundups on election topics ranging from political polls and campaign finances to voter behavior and provisional ballots. We also look at some of the topics that will appear on ballots in the form of ballot measures, as well as the policy topics voters say they care about most.

Covering opinion polls

• Questions to ask about opinion polls: This tip sheet outlines 11 questions journalists should ask to help them decide how to frame the findings of a public opinion poll — or cover them at all.
• What you need to know about margin of error: This tip sheet explains how to use margin of error to correctly interpret the results of opinion polls and surveys.
• Percent change versus percentage-point change: We explain the difference between these two math terms and provide tips for avoiding errors.
• The dangers of horse race reporting: When journalists cover elections as a competitive game, there can be harmful consequences for candidates, voters and news outlets, this collection of research suggests.
• Better horse race reporting: Because it’s unlikely journalists will stop reporting elections this way, we asked two scholars for ideas for at least improving these news stories.

Tips for covering midterm elections

• 8 tips from a former elections administrator: Tammy Patrick, a former federal compliance officer for the Maricopa County Elections Department in Arizona, provides advice for new and experienced journalists, including a list of things to monitor on Election Day.
• 11 tips from veteran journalists and election scholars: Experienced political reporters suggest ways journalists can make the best use of their time at local voting precincts. Meanwhile, scholars who research polling place dynamics share insights to help journalists spot problems and contextualize the information they gather.
• 4 tips on covering far-right rallies: Joan Donovan, an expert on right-wing extremism and misinformation campaigns, says journalists can do these four things to minimize harm and keep rumors, lies and other bad information out of their coverage.

Research to improve coverage of midterm elections

• The role of local election officials: We highlight five studies that examine the role elections officials and poll workers play in making voting run smoothly. One study explains how the different processes for registering people to vote can affect registration rates across a state.
• How health affects voter turnout: This roundup of research suggests people with chronic illnesses, mental health concerns, disabilities and the seasonal flu are less likely to vote.
• Factors that can influence voter decisions on ballot measures: We spotlight research on the various factors that can influence whether voters support or reject a ballot measure, including how it’s worded and where it appears on the ballot.

Research on ballot measure issues

We’ve also gathered and summarized research on several issues that will go before voters during this year’s midterm elections. In most states, voters will be asked to weigh in on proposals to enact new laws or policies, make changes to others or amend their state constitutions. You can help them make more informed choices by explaining what the research says about these topics.

• Sports betting: This piece looks at the landscape of legal sports betting in the U.S. and explains what the research says about how legalization affects tax revenues. It also provides a brief history of sports betting.
• Rent control: We’ve summarized research that investigates whether rent control and rent stabilization policies help tenants stay in their homes.
• Marijuana: Read this to get up to date about what’s known and unknown about the health effects of cannabis products.

Expert commentaries

• “Election Beat 2022”: Harvard media scholar Thomas E. Patterson has written a series of research-based columns examining issues around the 2022 midterm elections and how journalists cover elections more broadly.
• What journalists need to know about the ballot initiative process: The manager of a voter empowerment project discusses what it takes for citizens to get a proposition on the ballot and the many ways those efforts can be stalled or sidelined.

Issues that matter most to voters

Inflation, the economy, crime, health care and climate change ranked as the top five “most important problems facing the country today” in a recent survey of 21,122 Americans conducted by the COVID States project — a collaboration between Harvard Medical School; Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; Northeastern University Network Science Institute; Northwestern University and Rutgers University. Here’s a sampling of recent explainers and research roundups on those topics:

• 4 things journalists should know when covering an economic downturn: It’s important for journalists to aim for clarity in headlines and coverage and help audiences understand what a recession is and isn’t, who decides when the economy is in recession, and what really matters to most Americans’ economic perceptions.
• Real earnings in America: Parsing strong wage growth against high inflation: News outlets often report on inflation, but they don’t always cover the interaction between inflation and earnings.
• Gun buybacks: What the research says: Gun buybacks allow gun owners to trade their firearms to law enforcement, no questions asked. We dive into what the research says on whether they work to reduce gun violence.
• Our health care archive: Here’s where you’ll find our repository of research roundups, tip sheets, articles and explainers related to health, health care and health equity
• Covering scientific consensus: What to avoid and how to get it right: You may know that there’s a scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. But what does “scientific consensus” really mean? We explain the concept and how to avoid pitfalls when explaining it to your audience.

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Donald Trump would have “won” the 2022 U.S. presidential election if the vote counting had stopped on election night, just as Al Gore was the “winner” at one point on election night 2000.

The 2022 midterm election returns could also be marred by a rush to judgment by political leaders or news outlets. Millions of mail-in ballots will have been cast, and some states do not permit the counting of them before Election Day.

If analysts’ projections are correct, there’s not likely to be much suspense regarding control of the House of Representatives. The party out of power has gained House seats in 22 of the 25 midterms of the past century and has never failed to gain seats when the economy is struggling, and the incumbent president’s approval rating is below 50%. Add in the Democrats’ slim majority in the House and Republicans’ redistricting advantage, and it would be a political miracle if Democrats were to retain control of the House.

The Senate is a different story. There are 35 Senate seats being contested, 14 of which are currently held by Democrats. To retain their hold on the Senate, Democrats need to win at least 14 of the contested seats. According to the most recent ratings of the Cook Political Report, nine of the currently held Democratic seats are judged “safe” or “likely” while 17 are judged “safe” or “likely” Republican. If those projections hold, control of the Senate will come down to the 9 races that are judged to be toss-ups or leaning. If either party wins 5 of these contests, it will control the Senate.

Here are the nine presumably close Senate races and the likelihood that the outcome will be known on election night based strictly on how mail-in and absentee ballots are handled in the 9 states, mindful of the possibility that even if the count can begin before Election Day, it might not be completed by then or include ballots postmarked in time but not received.

• Counting can begin before Election Day: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada.
• Counting can begin Election Day before polls close: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
• Counting can begin only after polls close: New Hampshire.

The other factor that could lead to an uncertain Senate outcome on election night is Georgia’s requirement that a runoff election be held if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. If Democrats and Republicans split the other 8 races, Georgia’s seat would be decisive and a run-off election there is a distinct possibility. Polls show a virtual dead heat in the race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, with the Libertarian Party’s nominee, Chase Oliver, drawing enough support to deny either candidate an early November victory.

When presenting popular vote results, context will matter more than ever — the percentage of the statewide vote reflected in the count, the rough percentage of outstanding ballots that are mail-in ballots and when they will be tabulated, the locations within the state that have reported returns, the tendency of these locations to vote Republican or Democratic, and so on. Attention to these factors would signal that there are many more votes yet to come and could dissuade viewers from hasty conclusions or from believing a party’s premature claim to have won control of the Senate.

The 2022 midterms have not been a proud moment in our election history. Perhaps a bit of pride will be felt if turnout projections hold. Midterm turnout could reach 50%, which would be one of the highest levels in the past century. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be too boastful about an election in which half of the eligible voters stay home.

It’s hard to hold up the 2022 midterms as an example of democracy at its best. The midterms have been marred by the continuing false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, by new state laws that restrict ballot access, by deceptive political advertising, and by an unprecedented amount of campaign spending, much of it by independent expenditure groups.

Nor can it be said that the 2022 midterms have been one of the news media’s finest moments. News outlets have again served as a megaphone for unfounded charges and have provided little in the way of context that would help voters distinguish assertion from reality. For instance, there have been dozens of poll-driven stories on how the crime issue is hurting Democratic candidates, leading some voters to equate Democrats with crime. Rare has been the story explaining the factors contributing to crime and how, if at all, the problem can be traced to the policies of one or the other party.

If 2022 is what we’ve come to expect from candidates and media in this age of heightened party polarization and audience competition, a rush to judgment on election night would compound the ugliness of this election. Careful attention to the nature of the vote count in key races is essential. If journalists get it wrong, Americans’ eroding trust in elections will continue to decline.

Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is the founder of The Journalist’s Resource and author of several books, most recently “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” JR has posted a new installment of his Election Beat 2022 series every week leading up to the midterm elections. Patterson can be contacted at thomas_patterson@harvard.edu.

Further Reading:

Cook Political Report, “2022 Senate Race Ratings,” October 27, 2022.

Michael P. McDonald and Matthew P. Thornburg, “Interview Mode Effects: The Case of Exit Polls and Early Voting,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, 2012.

Stephen Pettigrew and Charles Stewart III, “Protecting the Perilous Path of Election Returns: From the Precinct to the News,” SSRN, Feb. 7, 2020.

Joseph E. Uscinski, “Too Close to Call? Uncertainty and Bias in Election-Night Reporting,” Social Science Quarterly 88, 2007.

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