Election coverage is always a big lift for newsrooms, but this election year had an added twist: the World Cup. We knew we needed to not only cover one of the world’s largest sporting events with depth and care, but also begin the hard work of election reporting as the August primary landed immediately after the World Cup concluded.
We held our first meeting to plan for coverage of the 2026 midterm election in May: three months before the primary; six months before the general election.
We spent the first several weeks examining what worked and what didn’t in previous election reporting, and implementing ways to best deliver the information people needed wherever they’d be most likely to find it.
We had a robust primary voter guide and timely night-of coverage in August, but with the lessons we learned along the way, we decided to dream bigger for November.
We launched our general election voter guide, including all the statewide and federal elections in both Missouri and Kansas, the day before early voting started – we wanted you to go to your polling places prepared. We launched “What’s the Deal, KC?,” a text line forum for us to hear directly from you about what questions you had, and then share the answers via text, on our talk show Up To Date, on our website and across our social media. And we shared regular updates on the issues on our social media.
With audience feedback, we created and reported robust voter guides for the Kansas and Missouri judges up for retention, and saw messages pour in about how much you loved seeing all that information in one place.
In addition, we partnered with our Gen Listen council to pack Casual Animal Brewing to standing room only the Tuesday before Election Night for a Politics and Pints event, where our panel of two KCUR reporters and a law professor took dozens of questions about this unprecedented election year in Kansas and Missouri.
And finally, on Election Night, we brought you live results, live analysis and breaking news updates as Kansas elected its first Democratic senator in nearly a century and Missouri repudiated most of its proposed constitutional amendments.
Behind every name on an election story that you read, voice on the radio or Kansas City Today that you heard and social media post that you saw are dozens of people who worked behind the scenes to make our entire election season a success. They organized events, coordinated volunteers, drafted email newsletters, edited stories, kept our broadcast humming, took calls and generally make KCUR an organization that can provide such a vital public service.
During just the week of the election itself, our stories got nearly three-quarters of a million views, concentrated especially on our results pages, our voter guide landing page and on judges and ballot issues. That’s more than double the last midterm election in 2024. “What’s the Deal, KC?” received hundreds of texts. And, most importantly, we heard from so many of you that you cast your ballots feeling informed.
Thank you for reading and listening, and let us know what you want to see next!
