A distinctive AP tool tracking every presidential campaign event highlights how the Electoral College leaves most American voters out — a reality told from one overlooked city.
By the first week in October, the presidential campaigns had made over 200 stops to try to woo voters ahead of November’s U.S. presidential election. The vast majority of that impressive total were to specific counties in just seven states — the so-called battlegrounds. In all, the campaigns have been directing their time, attention and money to a cluster representing just 10% of all voters registered nationwide, an outgrowth of the U.S.’s unique Electoral College system.
That data point was just one of many produced using a unique AP reporting tool developed by Democracy Team news editor Tom Verdin and multimedia journalist Kevin Vineys. Among many other uses, the tool helped power a story about all the other places in America left out of campaigning. Democracy Team reporter Christine Fernando, and Chicago-based visual journalists Melissa Perez Winder and Nam Y. Huh traveled to Waukegan, Illinois, a struggling, working-class city overlooked by campaigns despite being a short drive from the Milwaukee metropolitan area, a place that is visited routinely by presidential campaigns. Their story was told in text, a photo package and video, and the file embedded the interactive Vineys developed from the campaign tracking.
The tool is used several times a week for multiple stories about the presidential campaign, to add crucial context to AP stories. On a day when both Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump were in Pennsylvania, AP was able to add a contextual graph showing that the state had by far the most visits by the campaigns this year — 46. This gives the AP a competitive advantage, able to rely on our own reporting without having to rely on outside sources to show campaign trends.
Visit AP.org to request a trial subscription to AP’s video, photo and text services.
For breaking news, visit apnews.com.
Related articles
