News outlets are also grappling with how to cover voters in crucial states like Florida, Michigan, and Nevada, where journalists often gauge the direction of the country’s politics.

After 2016, when Donald J. Trump’s victory caught many prominent journalists by surprise (and led to remonstrations from readers and viewers), senior leaders in the news business pledged not to repeat the same mistakes. In 2020, went the refrain, political writers would focus on the heartland, leaving behind the conventional-wisdom factories of newsrooms in Washington and New York.

Man plans, and God laughs. Amid the pandemic, much of the country’s political press is now marooned in those coastal cities, covering a national race from couches in Georgetown and Brooklyn.

David Weigel, a nomadic campaign correspondent for The Washington Post, said in an email that he has been off the trail for a month, his longest stretch at home in Washington since 2017. He’s worried about what reporters are missing.

“Being able to check in with voters when some story was blowing up on cable is essential,” Mr. Weigel said. “It’s not just that it’s better to talk to voters at random. It’s that I’d worry, usually correctly, that online chatter was not reflecting what was happening.”

Mr. Weigel belongs to a band of road-warrior reporters that Peter Hamby, a former CNN campaign journalist, has deemed the “Avis Preferred” press corps: journalists who hoof it in the heartland, rather than offering analysis from afar.

“The value of traveling in political journalism is not to travel to Las Vegas to go to a rally,” Mr. Hamby, who hosts a political show on Snapchat, “Good Luck America,” said in an interview. “The value is to travel to talk to moms in a Whole Foods parking lot in Henderson, Nev. It’s not necessarily to cover a campaign event and just transcribe it.”