Much has changed in the nearly 20 years that Patricia Mazzei, a political correspondent for The New York Times, has covered elections. But one aspect of her life has remained the same: hitting the road.
Ms. Mazzei has driven more than 1,525 miles through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina this year while reporting on midterm races for The Times’s Politics desk.
“I try to get as wide a variety of reporting experiences as I can,” said Ms. Mazzei, who covered elections at The Miami Herald for a decade before arriving at The Times in 2017. “It’s incredible to get to explore different parts of the country.”
From her home base in Florida, Ms. Mazzei is among more than 400 Times reporters, editors, data analysts, video journalists and photographers who have been covering the thousands of races for House and Senate seats, governorships, judgeships and more throughout the United States.
Over days that can stretch from 3 a.m. wake-up calls to whenever a campaign rally ends at night, they have sought to nail down candidates’ positions; scrutinized polling data to spot trends; and spent countless hours talking with political advisers, pollsters, organizing groups and voters.
“It’s a big country and voters are complicated — and sometimes contradictory — and we always have plenty to explain on and after election night about what happened and how,” Ms. Mazzei said.
This year, The Times will have more than 100 reporters in at least 30 states on election night. The goal, said Michael Cooper, The Times’s Politics editor, is to take readers inside interesting races with national implications.
“This election will not only tell us who controls Congress and give us clues about what the last two years of President Trump’s term might look like, but will tell us a great deal about the nation itself,” he said. “What issues motivate Americans, and what do they want from their government? And how are both parties and candidates evolving in a time of rapid change?”
A growing part of that mission is visual, including on-the-ground photography and video.
The Times will have three video teams in the battleground states of Maine, Michigan and Texas talking with voters at the polls on election night. They will be part of a group of more than 40 people overall who will be involved in video coverage across a 24-hour operation run from newsrooms in London, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul.
The aim, said Beckey Bright, The Times’s manager of video editorial operations, is to provide a snapshot of voter sentiment, the candidates they support and the issues that matter to them.
For the first time, two journalists on the Visual Investigations team will also monitor the news to help assess questions about videos and images that may have been generated by artificial intelligence, said Mark Scheffler, the editor who leads the desk.
A major thrust of The Times’s reporting also happens behind the scenes, as more than 100 data journalists crunch the election results back at the New York newsroom. They are looking to illustrate trends for readers in specific races, said Benjamin Hoffman, a deputy editor on The Times’s election analytics team.
“We want to explain concepts like polling error with hard data in a way that hopefully takes out some of the uneasiness people have when looking at things like polls,” he said.
The team’s work is human-powered — not driven by A.I.
“One of our principles is that data and estimates should be checked, interpreted and analyzed by humans,” said Lindsey Rogers Cook, a deputy editor for election analytics.
On election night, The Times will rely on data from The Associated Press to regularly update results from more than 6,000 races. Those initial returns, along with precinct-level voting results from more than 100 web scrapers, will also feed the Needle, The Times’s estimate for final results.
New this year will be a feature called Times Voter Trends, which will publish the day after the election and break down estimates for the results of House and Senate elections by age, race, education and gender in every state. The goal is to reveal how different groups voted and identify shifts from previous elections.
Part of the fun, Ms. Mazzei said, is that voters cannot be reduced to a category on a spreadsheet.
“Voters don’t fit in neat partisan boxes and make decisions often based on their personal histories or emotions,” she said.
Some races, like the Senate battleground contests in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Texas that are expected to determine the balance of power, are priorities. But more often than not, Times reporters flag interesting and potentially pivotal contests worthy of more attention.
“They’re the ones out in the field talking to candidates, voters, sources, matching what they’re hearing with what they’re seeing to divine the impact of redistricting, broader political and societal trends, and demographic shifts,” said Ben Shpigel, an editor helping to oversee live political coverage.
Ultimately, he said, the goal is not only to help readers understand the stakes of an election that will determine how much power President Trump will have for the rest of his term, but also why they’re seeing the results they are, both locally and nationally.
“On Nov. 3,” he said, “I want readers to feel like the scope and totality of our coverage prepared them for any and all outcomes.”
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