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If you want to know how I got to be Votebeat’s managing editor, you have to start with a weather map.
If you were alive and consuming print media during the 1990s (back when they used to print out the internet on big pieces of paper), you might remember the big, colorful weather map on the back page of USA Today. This map captivated me as a child. I would make my parents buy it for me whenever we went out. I dreamed of the faraway destinations it introduced me to, like North Platte, Nebraska, and loved seeing the colors — those temperature bands — ebb and flow with the seasons.
I think that, when a young Nathaniel first saw a map of the Electoral College vote after the 2000 presidential election, it probably reminded him of that weather map.
Regardless, I was hooked. It helped that that map lived rent-free in the entire country’s head for 35 days after Election Day as we waited to see what color the last state would turn. I followed every twist and turn from the vote count in Florida as the nation and I learned, together, about the differences between a machine and manual recount and why ballot design matters.
I admit, with some discomfort, that there was a certain sports-like appeal to the 2000 election drama. That contest, with all its lead changes and stressful moments, thrilled me the same way an extra-innings Red Sox game would have. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in my experience, 80% of election junkies are also either baseball nerds or weather geeks.) But the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq were a sobering lesson that elections deeply and truly matter — and that just a few votes can have massive ramifications. By the time the 2004 presidential race rolled around, I was going to campaign rallies and hanging on every poll. I had fallen in love with elections.
When I graduated from college, I thought at first that I wanted to work on campaigns themselves, but the dogma and subjectivity of partisan politics turned me off. Soon I realized that I wanted to explain elections, not influence them, and promote democracy, not candidates. I started a blog and joined Twitter, where a like-minded community of map-loving election analysts had developed. I became a pollworker for a few cycles in my then-hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts. Eventually, I was hired to analyze elections for outlets like Inside Elections and FiveThirtyEight.
FiveThirtyEight was my home for seven great years — it’s where I did the most impactful work of my career, where I stepped into managing and editing, and where I learned more than I ever expected about the nuts and bolts of our democracy. Although FiveThirtyEight was best known for polling analysis and election forecasts, I was most proud of our coverage of election administration and voting rights. When the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled everything we thought we knew about the way Americans vote, we tracked all of the changes to election law and their effects on voters. When states redrew their congressional maps after the 2020 census, we analyzed the impacts of the new lines. And when President Donald Trump denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, we researched how many Republicans running for Congress and state office agreed.
FiveThirtyEight is also where I learned the importance of rigor and care in journalism. We fact-checked every line we wrote, questioned every assumption, because we knew our reporting would only matter if people trusted it. We held entire meetings about how best to visually communicate our point in charts and interactive features, because we knew that otherwise people might misinterpret them — either out of honest confusion or willfully, because it suited their purposes. In the environment of mistrust in elections that emerged after 2020 in particular, we wanted to be part of the solution, not the problem.
This, of course, is why Votebeat was founded in 2020 as well — and why I was so eager to come work here next. I always viewed Votebeat as the gold standard of reporting on elections, and I’m not just saying that because I work here now. It has pioneered a journalistic model for a newsroom that focuses on changes to election law and their effects on voters, on combating election-related misinformation and conspiracy theories, and on explaining how elections actually work.
That type of work has always been important, but it has become especially so in the last five years, as American democracy has come under acute strain. After the 2020 election, Trump and his allies claimed without evidence that massive voter fraud had cost him the election and attempted to overturn the result, exposing vulnerabilities in the often-overlooked mechanisms between votes being cast and the winner taking office. The episode shone a harsh light on — and encouraged misunderstandings of — aspects of election administration that, frankly, are imperfect, even if they aren’t nefarious.
The ghosts of 2020 continue to haunt our politics. According to Gallup, 43% of Americans were not too confident or not at all confident that votes in the 2024 presidential election would be cast and counted accurately. (They were, just as in 2020.) In its fervent pursuit of evidence of voter fraud, the new Trump administration has tried to exercise an unprecedented amount of power over elections via executive order and lawsuits. In an effort to tilt the midterm playing field in their favor, Republicans and Democrats alike have cast aside norms and redrawn congressional districts to all but guarantee they’ll flip House seats before a single vote is cast. And it remains to be seen what, if any, new obstacles voters themselves may face in going to the polls in 2026 and 2028.
I became a journalist almost by accident, guided by an internal compass toward the subjects that interested me and the type of work I loved to do. Several years ago, that brought me to campaigns, polling, and horse-race coverage, but that no longer feels like the biggest story on the elections beat. Who wins elections matters — but not as much as how well the democratic system itself is working: whether every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot, whether their votes are faithfully counted, and whether the election outcome reflects the true will of the people.
So now, my internal compass is pointing straight at Votebeat. At this point in my career, at this moment in history, I’m more sure than ever what I want to be doing — and it’s working here.
Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
