We went hard on election coverage in a midterm primary — and it paid off
Here’s a case for investing in local voter guides, especially for those obscure, down-ballot races.
Let me start with this: I really like voter guides.
Elections are one of those times when newsrooms see the utility of their work pay off very quickly. Campaign season is noisy and confusing, and voters can feel frustrated and disengaged. But a clear and accessible voter guide can make a big difference, helping voters feel more empowered with their decisions and more engaged overall with the issues in their community.
I’ve always had the most satisfaction in journalism when working on a project that demystifies a complicated issue or helps people better navigate a complex system, so every time an election came around, I jumped at the chance to work on it. I’ve been working on voter guides in some capacity at KPCC/LAist since the 2016 primaries. I’ve seen our approach become more voter-centric and our coverage get more comprehensive, robust, and useful every election cycle, and I feel confident saying that our coverage for the June 7, 2022, primary election in Los Angeles was our biggest local election success yet. I’ll get to the stats in a minute. But first, let’s consider some context.
June 7 was a primary election in a midterm year. We had some big-ticket races on the ballot, including primaries for the mayor of the city of Los Angeles and a high-profile contest for L.A. County Sheriff. But otherwise, it wasn’t the kind of election that was on most people’s radars. That was evident when we talked to residents on the street and when final turnout numbers for L.A. County came out: Just 28.4% of registered voters voted, not out of the ordinary for a midterm primary here. To top it off, the average ballot in L.A. County was eight pages long. One race had 23 candidates!
Traditional journalistic thinking about how to cover elections like this tends to go along these lines: Are candidates running for a powerful seat that everyone is paying attention to? Is it a competitive race with no clear front-runner? Does this outcome have the potential to change larger political dynamics? If so, we’ll cover it, but otherwise we’ll focus our resources elsewhere.
This was not how we thought about it at all.
Our goals
This year, KPCC/LAist set out to make the most comprehensive and useful election guide in all of Los Angeles. “Comprehensive” is pretty straightforward — cover as much as we could!
Here’s what we set out to do in order to make it the most useful guide, too:
- Cover as many races on the ballot as we possibly could — not just the high-profile mayoral and sheriff’s races, but also lesser-known seats like city controller, Superior Court judges, and county assessor, which are harder to find information on
- Focus heavily on helping voters make their choices, instead of just providing a bird’s-eye-view analysis of the dynamics of the election
- Explain not just who the candidates are and what they’re running for but also what that office does and what to consider when making a decision
How did we decide on this approach? There were a few factors:
In 2022, our newsroom made a conscious decision to focus our political coverage less on politicians and more on voters. We rebranded the politics beat as Civics and Democracy, and hired a reporter and engagement producer (that’s me) to focus on it.
We had years of intel pointing us in this direction. In 2016, KPCC started Human Voter Guide, a service where we answered L.A. residents’ questions about voting and elections. Election after election, the same patterns began to emerge: Voters wanted help navigating the mechanics of voting, and they wanted to understand what was on their ballot. It didn’t matter if the race wasn’t at all competitive, or if it was for some administrative seat that didn’t wield strong political power. They simply saw an item on their ballot, tried to find information on it, and…couldn’t.
As we published more and more voter guides, we saw this thirst for information show up in our digital traffic numbers, too. Our most popular guides in recent years were not for the most talked-about races, like governor or district attorney — they were for the L.A. Superior Court judicial elections, because voters had such a hard time finding information about the candidates. And, in 2018, we ran a last-minute story breaking down the two runoff candidates for California lieutenant governor — a race absolutely nobody was talking about — and it immediately shot up to the top of our traffic charts through Election Day.
Heading into the 2022 campaign, we understood what our audience needed and we had the newsroom’s commitment to focusing on voters. So this is where we pointed our resources.
What we did
A screenshot of the header for our 2022 Voter Game Plan landing page.
We got started in February, with the goal of publishing our full election guide published by mid-May, when mail-in ballots would be sent out to all registered voters in L.A. County. By the end, this is what we produced:
- 17 original election guides for local and statewide offices. We turned to our partners at CalMatters to help cover an additional seven races we didn’t have time to complete in-house. In past years, we’ve generally produced about seven or eight dedicated guides per election, in addition to feature stories exploring other aspects of the races.
- An interactive quiz called Meet Your Mayor, which allowed voters to find out which mayoral candidates aligned most closely with their views based on a short set of questions. This was inspired by a similar quiz produced by nonprofit local newsroom THE CITY for the New York City mayoral race in 2021. (They shared their code and walked us through all the steps to produce the quiz. If you want to do the same, you can contact them at info@thecity.nyc.)
- Two FAQs on voting mechanics, one of which focused on voting while unhoused.
- A question form for readers to ask us anything about voting or the election. This is a service KPCC/LAist has provided for several years now, previously under the name Human Voter Guide. This year, we received more than 120 questions, several of which led to stories to address points of confusion or common misconceptions. Question themes are also helpful for predicting what people will be searching for, helping us optimize headlines and social media language and predicting user journeys through the voter guide.
And this is just the editorial content that lived on the website. We had serious cross-departmental collaboration across KPCC/LAist that helped us create original art and page design for the guides, smooth functionality and user experience across the site, and lots of amplification through broadcast radio, original social posts, paid marketing campaigns, and consistent visibility in our daily newsletters. Our events team also put together a series of candidate interviews for mayor and county supervisor that fed into our guides.
The results
It was an unprecedented success.
Voter Game Plan received more than 1 million page views between the launch date on May 11 and the end of Election Week, more than any of our previous election packages have ever received before. On average, visitors to LAist.com spent more than five minutes per page on election content.
During our peak traffic period, the night before Election Day, we had more than 2,000 concurrent visitors at several points, about 10 times our daily peak average, and we also saw a significant increase in the number of pages readers consumed during their visit. The Chartbeat needle didn’t know what to do that night.
The vast majority of our traffic came from search, giving us yet another indication that voters all across the county wanted this information — and that this was a major opportunity to introduce our work to new readers.
Our most popular story, as usual, was our guide to the L.A. County Superior Court judicial elections. That wasn’t a surprise. But our second most popular story was our guide to the race for L.A. County assessor. This was exactly the kind of race a newsroom would have discouraged covering under traditional journalistic thinking: It’s a mostly administrative office with a heavily endorsed incumbent running for a third term against three little-known challengers. But our numbers showed that there was a strong audience desire to understand the office regardless.
And if the stats alone aren’t enough, here are some comments we got from readers after the fact:
Takeaways for other newsrooms
We all know that election coverage is vital to journalism’s role in supporting democracy, but hopefully our experience offers some ideas of how to maximize that role. Here are some key lessons:
Listening to your audience is key. We knew to approach our voter guide this way because we’ve been soliciting questions from the community and paying attention to their needs for years. It gave us enough confidence to know that the extra effort to cover all candidates and focus on down ballot races would pay off in the end.
It’s worth it to explain how offices work. How do you hire someone for a job if you don’t fully understand the job?? It paid off for us to invest extra time in explaining the role and responsibilities of an elected office, along with examples from recent history that demonstrate their power and tips from experts on qualities to consider in a candidate. These were the details that really helped voters figure out how to make a decision, and we can use this information again for future guides.
You don’t need infinite resources. We didn’t have a lot of staff to work on election coverage this year. We just decided to set a priority — more, and more comprehensive election guides — and focus our existing resources on it. With limited staffing, that meant that we had to do less daily race coverage. Looking at the results, we feel good about that call. We didn’t cover everything we wanted to, but we were able to do a lot more than we have in previous years. (Pro tip for making this work: You can never start too early.)
It doesn’t have to be a “big” election year. Who would’ve thought our coverage of a midterm primary would outperform our work from the 2020 presidential election? But it makes sense: When it’s hard to find information about a race or a candidate, voters search high and low to find it. That makes primary candidates and down ballot races all the more important to cover — not to mention it’s good for democracy, too.
A good user experience is also key. We spent a lot of time thinking about how voters might arrive on the guide and move through it, and after launch, we paid attention to how people actually moved through the guide and made adjustments to the design and navigation accordingly. We used infoboxes, tables of contents, and in-line modules to nudge people back to the main landing page once we realized that the overwhelming majority of people were landing on the guide via specific race pages. You can see the results of those efforts in the high recirculation rates and engaged minutes.
We’re not done yet
We got closer than ever to our goal of having the most comprehensive and useful voter guide in Los Angeles. But this is just the start! The June election allowed us to create a template for tackling future elections so that next time we can build out our coverage even more. And we have lots of ideas for even more things we want to do.
- Have thoughts about our process or want more details on what we did this year? We’d love to talk! Get in touch at engagement@scpr.org.
- Does your organization want to financially support our work to better equip voters to make decisions and become more engaged with issues in their community? Email grants@scpr.org.
- Empower more community-focused reporting by becoming an LAist member today at LAist.com/join.
