On Nov. 5, constituents will cast their final ballots for the next president of the United States. But as Electoral College votes are counted, hundreds of races for seats in Congress will play out, too, with their own ability to reshape the national political map.
Catie Edmondson, who has been reporting about Capitol Hill for The New York Times since 2018, closely follows the trends throughout election night to watch for any patterns and implications for results.
“This is a particularly interesting cycle to cover from a House race perspective, because it really does feel like control of the House is truly up for grabs,” Ms. Edmondson said in a recent interview.
Congressional politics have been especially tumultuous the past few years, Ms. Edmondson said, but she and her colleagues have learned to pivot.
“It’s pretty ingrained in us at this point to just roll with the punches and try to figure out what’s going to happen next,” she said.
Ms. Edmondson also discussed her approach to covering election night, how she keeps track of so many candidates and how she adapted her reporting after President Biden dropped out of the race this summer.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You started your career at The Times in 2018 covering a momentous congressional race, and now we’re talking about another important one that is pretty tense, I imagine, from a reporting perspective.
It makes it more interesting to report on, honestly. The last couple of cycles, when it came specifically to House races, there was conventional wisdom that prevailed in the months leading up to Election Day, and it turned out to not be quite right.
There was a lot of talk last cycle about a red wave, the idea that Republicans were going to absolutely crush it in not only competitive seats but also reach seats, or those that might be long shots. And we saw that not really come to pass. Instead, Kevin McCarthy became speaker of a very, very thin Republican majority. The cycle before that, Democrats expected to pick up a number of House seats, and instead they lost in places they really didn’t expect to lose.
When it comes to this cycle, there hasn’t really been any conventional wisdom that has dictated coverage. That frees us up to go into these districts and cover races without any preconceived ideas about which way the political winds are blowing.
Is there anything else that separates this year’s races from previous ones, and how has that changed your reporting approach?
The major and obvious wrench that was thrown into the reporting on congressional races this cycle was the change at the top of the ticket for Democrats. One of the reasons we had so many congressional Democrats saying that they had qualms about Biden’s ability to be a strong top-of-the-ticket for them was because they were seeing in their own polling that Biden was dragging them down in their races.
That change upended coverage for our reporters who are focused on the presidential races, but it also upended, to some degree, our coverage as well, because we had to figure out what the ramifications were for the down-ballot races.
I was actually on the campaign trail in Wisconsin doing a story on the Senate race and how the pressure on Biden to step down was affecting Senator Tammy Baldwin, the incumbent Democrat who is defending her Senate seat there, and I was with her at an event when he made the announcement that he was stepping down. The change in energy in that room was so palpable, and how relieved members of her base were, how they felt like this gave them a fighting chance to defend the White House, to defend the seat in Wisconsin. That was remarkable to see play out in real time.
How do you prepare for coverage on election night itself?
I know it’s going to be a late night, so I always try to sleep in, though I never can. The adrenaline and the excitement of the day mean that I always end up waking up early, so it becomes an incredibly long day. Maybe one year I’ll figure it out.
Professionally, there are only so many things you can do while ballots are being cast. You can try to glean some insights about to what extent you’re seeing large numbers of turnout in certain areas. But with mail-in ballots and early voting, it’s hard to do the tea-leaf reading.
Given that the race for the House is so competitive, and the fact that a lot of the most competitive key races run through New York and California, which take some time to report their election results, I’m probably not going to know who has control of the House on election night. I’m also trying to gird for potentially a long few days of coverage where we’re not able to definitively say who is going to have the House majority.
How do you keep track of all the candidates and their histories?
Part of it is talking with sources and asking open-ended questions. I called a source yesterday who is a political operative; it’s his job to watch all the races. I was asking him: Where are there sleeper races? What aren’t we focused on that I should be keeping an eye on?
I do think it’s a truism of every single cycle that there’s always one surprise that we didn’t see coming. Obviously, we want to minimize that. But it also is just part of life.
I also tend to think about these races in buckets. There’s the moderate Republican who is running in a district that Biden won in 2020. There are the Democrats who are running in districts that Trump won in 2020. Those are typically rural districts. So I try to sort it out systematically that way.
What else are you going to be watching for on election night itself?
I’m going to be watching those specific races. In 2020, when we thought Democrats were going to have a good night, there were a pair of Democratic congresswomen in Florida. Their results came in pretty early, and they both lost. The question was, is that a Florida-specific thing, or is it a bellwether for Democrats who are about to have a bad night — and it ended up being the latter.
Similarly, during the last cycle in 2022, there were a number of seats that Democrats held in the Midwest. I’m from the Midwest, so I was particularly interested in watching them. I thought the Democrats were not going to win, yet we saw, seat after seat, them holding on.
Sometimes there are interesting regional dynamics at play that you have to keep an eye on. But in general, you’re watching to see if a particularly strong candidate has lost their race. And I’m looking for signs that might have broader implications for the national map.
When I go out to these districts, I go with a blank notebook. You talk to as many people as you can, and you listen to what they have to say. That’s what determines the story.
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