When the winner’s name isn’t enough: How the AP is leaning into explanatory journalism to call races

Ten years ago, when the Associated Press declared the winners of the 2014 midterm elections, the alerts it sent out were little more than headlines: So-and-so won such-and-such election in this or that state. The updates were short and to the point — no more than 120 characters, usually — and the AP didn’t see any reason to add more detail. People trusted the electoral process, and they trusted the AP’s long history of calling elections big and small across the country.

But that was 10 years ago. Now, said David Scott, VP and head of news strategy and operations at the AP, four years of election conspiracies have eroded that trust. “Our audiences demand more,” Scott said on a recent panel about how election calling works hosted by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. (The panel was cosponsored by the Nieman Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School’s Journalist’s Resource and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and was moderated by Visiting Nieman Fellow and former Washington Post and AP executive editor Sally Buzbee.) “They want to know what goes into those headlines. They want to know how their democracy works. And so all of these things that used to be in a binder at your desk on Election Night that you would have available if you needed it, and maybe you would use two facts out of the 10,000 that are in that binder — we’re [now] constantly looking for ways to turn that into journalism.”

For most of the AP’s history, Scott explained, questions of how and why — how voting works in states and counties across the country; how the AP calls races, which it’s done since 1848; why races are or aren’t called even if there appear to be large leads — have mostly been questions for discussion inside the newsroom. But for the 2024 U.S. election, the AP is retooling its coverage through the lens of explanatory journalism, launching its first-ever digital livestream of election results and creating a dedicated hub on its website to answer big-picture, nationwide questions about how the election works, including a “Decision Notes” section that’s all about diving into the state-by-state nitty gritty of what to expect on election day.

“What we’ve learned, especially in the last few cycles, is that it’s not necessarily possible or a good idea to let [the electoral] process play out in silence, because that creates the opportunity for bad actors to try to use that silence to advantage their agenda,” said panelist Robert Yoon, an elections reporter at the AP who spearheaded the Decision Notes hub. “If there comes a point where there are a lot of votes in and election night is in the rearview mirror, but there still hasn’t been a winner called, that’s an opportunity for us to explain what we’re doing, pull back the curtain, and talk about why there hasn’t been a race call.”

This could help reduce the feeling of uncertainty that many of us remember from 2020, when voters saw what looked like big swings in vote counts. In Pennsylvania, for example, Donald Trump was ahead of Joe Biden by 700,000 votes by 6 a.m. on the Wednesday morning after Election Day, but the AP hadn’t yet called the race because reporters knew both that state law prohibited election officials from counting mail-in ballots before election day, and that there were also more mail-in ballots than usual due to the pandemic. The public, however, didn’t necessarily know those things, and the long stretches of silence between updates proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theories. This year, part of the AP’s transparency efforts include making clear whether election officials are taking breaks from counting and when to next expect results.

The AP, which will have a record 5,000 people working on election night and declare winners in more than 6,800 races, plans to make its new explanatory election coverage a prominent part of its website and social media presence, as well as providing stories to member news organizations. That’s going to help shore up existing coverage from newsrooms like The Philadelphia Inquirer, where reporter Katie Bernard covers election administration.

“We put out a story ahead of the election explaining to our readers how we call races, that we rely on the AP, and what the AP process is, so they have an understanding when they pull up our website and see the tab of results where we’ve pulled that from,” Bernard said on the panel. “In addition to watching the results come through on the AP, I will be calling our local counties, asking how many mail ballots they ended up getting in, how many they have counted, how many they have left to count, seeing if all of the machinery is running as it’s supposed to, or if there is going to be a slowdown because a machine broke down unexpectedly.”

Journalists at the AP hope these combined efforts at transparency will leave less room for misinformation to take root, and make debunking conspiracy theories both easier and quicker.

“One of the things we can all do a better job of is just helping the public understand the scale of what the public does in a U.S. general election,” Scott said. “160 million people are going to cast ballots; 98% to 99% of them are going to do it on a piece of paper with a pen that then is going to go through a voting machine, and local election officials are going to tabulate those votes and report them out. Think about the scale that’s involved. The fact that we will know likely within a couple of days who the next president is, and maybe even on election night or early Wednesday morning, is an amazing, amazing thing.”