How Cog will cover the 2024 election

Editor's Note: This is a letter from the editors included in WBUR's weekly opinions and ideas newsletter, Cognoscenti. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.

The Iowa caucuses are over, all eyes are on New Hampshire and the Republican field — where the number of candidates vying for the nomination was once in the double digits — has shrunk to three.

The general election, on Nov. 5, is nearly 10 months away and it’s impossible to exaggerate how unusual this political season may be.

According to nearly every public poll of Republican primary voters, it appears former President Donald Trump is likely to be the GOP nominee. He faces four criminal indictments, totaling 91 felony counts, including for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. President Joe Biden, at 81, is our nation’s oldest president. He remains deeply unpopular in public polls, in spite of notable legislative victories. And he’s basically ignoring this Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic is officially over, but wars rage abroad. Congress is as gridlocked as it’s ever been. Conservative Supreme Court justices are wielding their power — on abortion, voting rights and the administrative state. And even though the economy is improving, public opinion about it continues to be dour.

We want to make sure our commentaries and essays are insightful and productive, rather than adding to the noise and confusion.

At Cog, we’ve been talking about how we can make sense of the 2024 election. We want to make sure our commentaries and essays are insightful and productive, rather than adding to the noise and confusion.

And so, amid the whirl of election news over the next 10 months, we’ll focus on the issues and ideas that are most important to voters, including health care, immigration, climate, the economy and the health of our democracy. We aim to bring you personal stories that help you understand the issues, and candidates, in new ways.

There is no shortage of criticism about how the press covered the last two elections. That’s forefront in our minds, too. We’ll take care to cover, as NYU journalism Professor Jay Rosen writes: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” (No horse race stuff for Cog, at least as much as we can avoid it.) We’ll also be paying careful attention to how we talk about Trump. We believe it’s important to examine the former president’s language and campaign promises, and to call out when he attacks the judicial system or uses rhetoric that suggests he aspires to be an authoritarian president.

Mostly, though, we’ll do our best to think of election coverage as a conversation with our readers — not only about the candidates on the ballot, but also about where the country is going.

We receive far more submissions than we can publish, and we make choices every day about which pieces are most valuable to our readers. If you have ideas about political issues you’d like to see us cover in the coming year, or have an idea for a commentary, please email us at opinion@wbur.org.

The poet Mary Oliver seems to pop up in the work we publish over and over again. In her poem “Yes! No!” she wrote: “To pay attention / this is our endless and proper work.” That phrase is always a beacon for Cog, and especially so this year. 

Thank you for reading.