Creator Midterms Guide

Tips and tricks for news creators covering the midterms

Slide 1 of 13
How we cover elections: what we’ve learned calling races, checking facts, and covering politics online — and how to apply it to your own channel.
Our creator philosophy. 38% of Americans ages 18–29 say they regularly get news from influencers on social media, per Pew Research Center. Creators offer something newsrooms structurally can’t: a two-way connection. You reply to comments. You engage with your community in person, not just from behind a desk. You’re reachable in a way a news anchor never has been. Our goal is to combine that accessibility with journalism standards — and give creators the tools to cover candidates, races, and issues fairly, accurately, and with integrity. We’re not here to tell your audience what to think, or how to vote. We’re here to help you give them what they need to decide that for themselves.
How we call races. Election coverage requires an especially high standard of accuracy — higher than almost anything else you’ll cover this year. We use Decision Desk for election calls: they’ve built a long track record of accuracy and speed, and they’re independent of any single network’s incentives. If we’re not using Decision Desk, we wait until two traditional, reputable news organizations call the race, and cite them as our sources. We don’t take a candidate’s concession or victory claim as fact — only an official call counts.
Being right doesn’t mean making your audience happy. In 2024, we called several swing states for Trump before outlets like the AP had made the same call because we were following Decision Desk HQ’s data, not waiting on the networks. Safe to say our audience was angry, but being accurate and being popular aren’t always the same thing on Election Night.
Some past election content: a four-slide Instagram carousel. “Californians vote to gerrymander the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats”; a map of states racing to redraw their congressional lines ahead of the 2026 midterms; a table of how the six states that passed new maps could affect the House makeup; and “What happens next?” on the legal challenges. We prepped this carousel before the election so that we could post immediately after results were announced, and used the subsequent slides to put the impact of California’s vote in context with the other states gerrymandering.
Some past election content: two TikTok political deep dives, on Marjorie Taylor Greene and on AOC. Political deep dives like these are where you can set yourself apart from other creators just churning out election updates. Although these require in-depth research and data, they connect with audiences because they’re different from the other election content people see on the feeds.
Tone is yours to own. Your coverage doesn’t need to sound like ours, or like anyone else’s. You know your audience better than any producer or editor does. How you explain a Senate race to your followers should sound different depending on who’s watching, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing accuracy. What can flex: your tone, your pacing, how much context you give, how casual or formal you sound, what you assume your audience already knows, the format, the topics you decide to cover. What can’t flex: the facts themselves.
How to fact-check like a journalist. Trace it to the source: not “someone said,” not a screenshot of a tweet — always find where the claim originated. Independently corroborate: one outlet reporting something isn’t the same as it being confirmed. Separate reporting from spin: what actually happened vs. what someone wants you to think happened can be different. When you’re wrong, correct: deleting instead of correcting looks like you’re hiding something, even when you’re not.
A quick vocab lesson. Election Night has its own language; using it correctly makes you sound credible. “Leading”: currently ahead in the vote count, not the same as winning. “Too early to call”: not enough votes counted yet to know the outcome with confidence. “Too close to call”: the margin is within the range where more counting could change the outcome. “Projected” / “Called”: a race has been decided based on data and modeling, even if 100% of votes aren’t counted.
All about mirages. A “mirage” is when early results seem to favor one candidate, then shift as more votes are counted. They can happen to either party, because ballots aren’t all counted at the same pace: mail-in ballots take longer than in-person votes, and counties vary in size and speed. In recent elections, Republican voters have leaned toward voting in person and Democratic voters toward voting by mail, so early results can favor Republicans before shifting as mail ballots are added, creating a “red mirage.” If you don’t know a shift like that is possible, it can look alarming — even suspicious. That’s often where “rigged election” claims come from. But a mirage is a common feature of how ballots get processed. It is not evidence of manipulation.
Important races to watch. There are hundreds of races on the ballot; you can’t cover all of them. We identified 45 House and Senate races that we think are the most competitive and will decide control of Congress, shown on two maps: House districts and Senate states. If you only have bandwidth to cover a handful of races closely, we suggest you start here.
Your cheat sheet: The Recount’s voter guide. All 45 races, broken down — who’s running, the issues defining the race, and local reporting to go deeper. It’s free, it’s nonpartisan, and it’s yours to use however fits your audience. Make it your own homework, or point your audience straight to it.
Spend Election Night with us. On November 3, we’re turning The Recount’s NYC office into a working newsroom for a group of creators. Follow results alongside our newsroom, tap us for information and context, create content, and collaborate with other creators throughout the night. Scan to request a spot.