This has been a midterm election cycle unlike any other. Wealthy donors spent staggering sums. Both parties moved to redraw congressional district lines. President Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly questioned whether the results could be trusted even before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit that said the federal government would contest any outcome in which Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent in Alaska, was not victorious.
Newsrooms, including ours, have tried to plan how we will cover an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters. Was the Alaska lawsuit a single data point or a harbinger?
As we prepare to write about Nov. 3 and beyond, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to game out what might happen in the future — not our strong suit. The record shows that journalists are pretty good at telling readers what happened, particularly if we have some time and some data to sift through, and much less good at forecasting the future.
And yet we have to plan. Over the past few weeks we have prepared our reporters and editors to cover every scenario we can imagine. None of us have forgotten the chaos of 2020 when Trump was urged by advisers to send the military to seize voting machines in states he had lost. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as lawmakers gathered to certify Joe Biden’s victory underscored the sense that literally anything was possible in the aftermath of elections.
We will have reporters on the ground in 11 key states covering voting, with even more in Washington, D.C., and others on standby. Our reporters have detailed what experts will be watching. But elections are no longer confined to Election Day (early voting and voting by mail constitute a huge share of the electorate). And our plans for covering voting stretch back many months.
Over the past year, we’ve tried to use the techniques of accountability journalism to add new facts to this pivotal moment in American history.
We have focused considerable attention on the mechanics of elections, a once-arcane issue that has become a central aspect of the MAGA movement’s argument that Trump’s 2020 loss was “rigged” by his opponents. We examined how the Trump administration depleted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the arm of the federal government charged with safeguarding election systems. We discovered that Department of Homeland Security officials had asked CISA to obtain a voting machine and hack it without informing the manufacturer of any vulnerabilities found. The plan wasn’t acted on, but its existence made CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. CISA and DHS didn’t respond to our questions, but a White House spokesperson said Trump “has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
Another story looked at how delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures endangered the validity of mail-in ballots in rural counties, typically Republican strongholds, during this year’s primaries. The Postal Service said such delays are less likely in the general election.
One of our most detailed election stories traced the career of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who spearheaded the legal attacks on the 2020 results. Mitchell leads a coalition of what she calls “election believers” — people who scour the voting results for errors that they believe point to larger conspiracies. Changes she’d hoped Trump could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. But she has nonetheless become the voice of a well-funded national movement, one which has the president’s ear. When Trump is weighing what to do in the aftermath of this week’s vote, our reporting strongly suggests that Mitchell will be among the people he listens to.
We asked to speak with Mitchell multiple times. She declined but told us in an email: “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.” A White House spokesperson said she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.
We have also spent time doing the traditional work of investigative reporting, looking closely at candidates’ records in public office. A newsroom like ours can’t cover every race, so we focus our resources on areas where we have particular expertise.
Our team in Texas has covered state Attorney General Ken Paxton for years, and we kept our focus once he announced he would run for the U.S. Senate. One story looked at his travels, revealing that only 1 in 6 of his nearly 1,000 out-of-state trips were linked to his official duties. Texas taxpayers paid $3.3 million for Paxton’s security detail to accompany him. (Paxton didn’t answer our questions, but his office said he “faced numerous security threats.”) That has become an issue in the Senate campaign.
Another opportunity arose from an investigation that was seemingly not related to the midterms: our examination of the Trump administration’s handling of the Justice Department. We began many months ago to look for promising cases that had been dropped and found out the FBI had been looking into pay-to-play allegations involving prominent Democratic and Republican members of Congress. The case included a bipartisan list of political figures such as Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine running in a closely contested race this year, and James Clyburn, a leading Democratic representative from South Carolina who’s also on the ballot this year.
Our first story revealed that Collins helped a little-known defense contractor win millions in federal contracts while the company’s CEO helped bankroll her 2020 reelection effort through a donation made via a shell company. Our second story revealed that the FBI was looking into interactions that Clyburn and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July, had with the same contractor. Collins has denied all wrongdoing. “A donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Clyburn’s office said. Graham’s communications director wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior … are simply false.” The FBI stopped examining the allegations after Trump purged the bureau. Our coverage likewise has become an issue in the Maine race.
We stand at a moment of uncertainty in our history as a democracy. Trump has made his willingness to smear news organizations an essential aspect of his appeal. He routinely insults reporters to their face and has attempted to ban some outlets from the White House and Air Force One because he didn’t like the stories they wrote about him. He has diverted hundreds of federal agents from their jobs fighting drug cartels and organized crime to search for evidence that noncitizens have illegally voted in federal elections. Hardly any were found.
I’m deeply reluctant to make any predictions about how all this will end. ProPublica prepared for an array of dire scenarios in November of 2024 that might arise from a close election. None of them came to pass as Trump decisively prevailed. A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the Alaska Senate race results over the weekend, and the Trump administration’s plans to appeal stand on shaky legal ground.
The one thing I know for certain is that we will keep digging into the story of what really happened in this election, whoever wins.
