Election Day is 14 days away. Every day of the countdown, Times Insider will share an article about how our election coverage works. Today, the editor of the Politics team offers a bird’s-eye view.
Covering a presidential election isn’t new territory for David Halbfinger. But the 2024 race may be his biggest challenge yet.
Mr. Halbfinger, the editor of the Politics desk at The New York Times, served as the deputy politics editor during the 2016 presidential election. After a stint as the Jerusalem bureau chief, he returned to the States in 2021 to lead The Times’s politics coverage, diving headfirst into preparation for the 2022 midterms.
And not long after that, he started planning for the biggest news moment of 2024: the presidential election.
Of course, thanks to a whiplash of events no one could have anticipated — assassination attempts on former President Donald J. Trump; President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race; and Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket — those plans inevitably changed. And changed again.
Then there have been all the headline-making moments in between: arguments between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden over golf handicaps; Ms. Harris’s fund-raising records; and false claims by the Republican presidential ticket about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
The unconventional nature of this election cycle has required an unconventional approach to coverage. But Mr. Halbfinger, alongside many others in the newsroom, thrives in the chaos.
“It’s a lot more exciting to cover news when it’s changing and full of surprises,” Mr. Halbfinger said in a recent interview. “Covering what’s been expected for a long time can be challenging, too, and requires great creativity. But nothing beats a story that takes everyone by surprise.”
Not to mention, he added, “there are some challenges that are just the nature of covering Donald Trump, who continues to be unlike any other politician before or since.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How are you organizing the coverage of this election cycle?
We have the biggest team we’ve ever had covering politics for The Times. It’s a fabulously talented, experienced, capable team. But a presidential election is such a huge story that you have to think about the Politics team as the nose cone of the rocket in proportion to the overall team.
Everyone is involved, from the top editors at the paper to people whose names will never appear on a story — dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Probably the biggest operation that I don’t really have any role in is the people who make the Needle happen. There’s our polling and results operation, run by our Election Analytics team. We’ll also have stringers across the country gathering data.
Where we are now is mapping out our deployments for the five or so days before the election, election night and the aftermath. That is not something the Politics desk can do on its own.
The battle for the House is going to be fought largely in New York and California. So the Metro team will be involved in covering those races, as will the California staff. Our Graphics desk is fully engaged, as is a small army of journalists in Photo, Video, Audio and many other corners of the newsroom.
When did you start planning?
We’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but it’s been a turbulent year, especially this summer. We had one election unfolding, and then it became another. That’s been fairly consuming. We are now planning, in earnest, almost daily to map out what we’re going to do.
Because the year has been so turbulent, how did your approach to coverage change?
We’ve had to completely overhaul the way we’re organized. We had one structure when it was the current president against the former president, and it became a very different thing.
We’ve now got one terrific editor, Manny Fernandez, overseeing our Trump reporters, and another, Zach Johnk, overseeing our Harris reporters. We also brought over a couple of terrific reporters from the White House team, Erica Green and Katie Rogers, who had experience covering Harris.
We’ve added two reporters who are doing what you can call color pieces, more on the atmospherics around Trump and Harris. We have Shawn McCreesh writing feature stories about the Trump campaign, and we have Rebecca Davis O’Brien taking a similar approach to the Harris campaign. When it was Trump versus Biden, the mood of the whole campaign — and of the voters — was sharply different, and there wasn’t the opportunity for that kind of story, particularly on the Biden side. But the mood on the Democratic side, and across much of the political landscape, has brightened quite a bit with Harris. That was something that we wanted to reflect in our coverage.
Does that make it a more challenging campaign to cover?
It’s different. One way you can speed things up is to put more people on something in a hurry. We had a lot of people from across the newsroom, for example, doing stories on the selection of Tim Walz — that happened very quickly. Ordinarily in a two-year-long presidential campaign, the veepstakes could go on for months. This was very compressed.
Does that excite you?
Oh, yeah. The story got better. The summer was incredibly tumultuous. It was like being on the front seat of a roller coaster, and you just didn’t know what was going to happen.
I’ve been the Politics editor since 2021 — we saw the Biden-Trump rematch coming for a long time. There were a lot of smart people who thought that Joe Biden would never drop out of the race, and then that debate happened. Up until that point, there was a very grim mood in the campaign, certainly on the Democratic side.
It required a lot of creativity from our reporters to keep coming up with new angles on that story, because it was so static for so long.
Is there anything you think might change in future election coverage because of this cycle?
I don’t know what I would change up just yet. I think we’ve learned a lot about how to do Live coverage, our rolling blog of up-to-the-minute campaign news and political analysis from across the country — which includes everything from very short updates to full-length articles.
We’re learning every single day how to be fast without compromising on accuracy, and how to appropriately contextualize and make careful news judgments on what we’re seeing in real time.
We have tremendous new tools, and a presidential campaign is a really good stress test for them. I’m either getting or giving guidance, on what feels like a daily basis, about how to do what we do, and that’s challenging.
It feels like we’re all getting doctorates in political journalism this time around. And we don’t know what Election Day or the aftermath will bring. But we’ll be ready.
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