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One of the closest, most surprising and momentous presidential elections in recent memory has broadcast and cable networks preparing for the unexpected for its finale: election night.
Traditionally one of the highest-rated news nights of the cycle, this year the challenges for news divisions are in determining the wisest use of resources with all seven swing states within the margin of error, no easy task given the cost pressures on linear TV in general. Added to that are concerns over security, safety and misinformation, with recent incidents serving as a reminder of potential more alarming situations on November 5.
“Definitely, I have never seen anything like it. There’s no question about that,” said Mary Hager, CBS News‘ executive editor of politics, who has been doing election nights at CBS News since 1992.
“There’s so much information, misinformation,” she said. “There’s so many people involved. Never, certainly that I can remember, has a presidential election been this close. When you have seven battleground states where it is literally a toss-up — that just doesn’t happen.”
There is every reason to believe that this will not be an election night of a generation ago, when it was treated as almost a sure thing that a winner would be declared by midnight or just afterward. The tightness of the race, coupled with different state rules on handling mail-in voting, makes it all the more unlikely that viewers will go to bed knowing who the 47th president will be: Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
“This has sort of become the new norm for our elections, right?” said David Chalian, vice president and CNN political director. “This is just the nature of how we vote and how the votes are counted and processed, and how polarized and deeply divided the American electorate is.”
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Chris Jansing, the MSNBC anchor and senior national correspondent, said, “I’m approaching this as not an Election Day but an Election Week, because not only of course we have the key race for president, but who’s going to control the House, who’s going to control the Senate. Those things could go on for a while and, likely, I think, will go into the following days.”
She also has words of advice: “Anybody who says they know what is going to happen — don’t trust them.”
Networks have been preparing for months if not years for the evening, which last cycle drew almost 57 million viewers to coverage across outlets in primetime, according to Nielsen. Since then, the competition has only gotten fiercer; Amazon, for instance, is launching an election special anchored by Brian Williams, and many viewers will be monitoring results on social media and other platforms.
Rick Klein, vice president and Washington bureau chief for ABC News, said that a challenge as the hours progress in the evening is that “it’s such a gusher of information. That’s voting data. That’s exit polls. That’s anecdotes. Reports in the field. Legal challenges. It’s what campaigns are saying, it’s what people are saying, it just all comes at you very fast. … The hardest thing is to slow down when things move quickly, and to take the requisite steps to make sure we aren’t getting ahead of the story.”
Carrie Budoff Brown, NBC News senior vice president of politics, said preparations started years ago, noting that since the 2022 election they have had correspondents and embeds in key states. She described the network’s “multi-layered approach” that “has attempted to take into [account] all kinds of considerations, and that sort of sophisticated apparatus is something that, taken together, is more robust than anything we’ve ever done.” She said that, in planning, “there have been simulations of all sorts happening at all levels of our organization.”
Networks have been making comprehensive plans for how to handle election challenges, which already seems likely if Trump loses the race. Given that news divisions already have been covering legal proceedings over the counting of ballots and other issues, the goal may one of endurance more than anything else.
“Expect the unexpected,” said Doug Rohrbeck, Fox News senior vice president of Washington news & politics. “Everything has been unexpected along the way.” He said that they will be nimble enough to change up to get to a different county or a different state.
“Every election night is sort of full of twists and turns, and I think for us, the most important thing is to be flexible,” he said. “It’s to take our time. It’s to educate the audience and to sort of avoid the chaos and confusion that could erupt.”
A number of factors make this election different from the past.
Security
An incident this week in which ballot drop boxes were set ablaze at two locations in Washington and Oregon magnified concerns over some major action on Election Day.
NBC News reported this week that a Joint Intelligence Bulletin warned of the threat of domestic extremists seeking to disrupt the election including potential targets such as candidates, elected officials, election workers, members of the media and judges involved in election cases, as well as polling places, ballot drop boxes, voter registration locations and rallies and campaign events.
“We are working hard to be prepared,” CBS News’ Hager said. “I have had countless meetings in the last couple of weeks where we are looking at each other and saying, ‘OK, what have we not thought of?’ What is it that we can be surprised by, especially this campaign which has been one series of surprises right after the other. But I think we’re in great shape.”
Hager said that in the event of an unexpected security situation, “that is where our stations and affiliates and reporters in the field are crucial to us. And we got a network and a flow chart set up for communication and how we’re going to relay information, how we’re going to hear tips, how we are going to run them down to check them out.”
She added, “Our best-case scenario is that we have overprepared on that front and don’t need to call in all the resources that we are lining up just in case.”
Cherie Grzech, president of news and politics for NewsNation, said that “what concerns me is the unpredictability that you get in elections. Certainly the news cycle is much more rapid now, and you have so much more unpredictability that we have seen already in this election season.”
She said that they have a comprehensive plan “not only leading up to the election but coming out of the election. We’re going to be programming 24 hours that evening and we certainly will extend that as needed.”
“We’re looking at a 50-50 kind of race. I think you have got to be prepared for anything,” she said, adding that includes the potential for large-scale protests.
“In my mind, you prepare as much as you can, but you also have to make sure that as moments come up, that you are able to inform the public enough of what’s going on and adapt as needed.”
Misinformation
On the day of the New Hampshire primary this year, a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice tried to discourage people from coming to the polls. A political consultant was fined millions of dollars by the FCC and faces criminal charges, but the incident got widespread attention as a kind of alarm bell for what could come next.
In endorsing Harris for president, Taylor Swift cited an image that falsely showed her backing Trump.
More recently, intelligence officials and the FBI determined that Russian actors “manufactured and amplified” a video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania. The agencies said that they expect “Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.” Such influence operations are expected through the inauguration.
Networks have been reporting on the potential for deepfakes, while keeping vetting teams on alert as voters go to the polls. State election officials have been gaming out scenarios, and a public interest group has used celebrity deepfakes to try to warn voters to be on the lookout. Politico’s Sasha Issenberg, author of The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Defeating Disinformation and Winning Election, has warned of the potential impact on down-ballot races in particular, where voters are less familiar with the candidates.
CNN’s Chalian said that “that kind of rigorous editorial vetting will happen on election night like it does every day of the year in our news coverage, but obviously there’s going to be a heightened sensibility around it, around the election, given the desire for some bad actors to participate.”
NBC News’ Budoff Brown said that the network is preparing to grapple with “a pretty significant flow of information, and having to decide what is accurate and what is not. That is probably as it is every day, but I think it is just so much more on an election day. There’s just going to be a lot of information flowing around — what is good, what is not, and we have got to get that right.”
CBS News has been building up CBS News Confirmed, a fact-check and verification unit, with specialists working throughout the day. NBC News has Vote Watch, with monitors misinformation and vote irregularities.
Fox News’ Rohrbeck said that it is “always a challenge to identify deepfakes and artificial intelligence. So we’re very aware. We’re very cautious. And there isn’t a need to rush things to air that we don’t know for certain, have confirmed from multiple sources, because the technology now is scary, how hard it is to tell.”
There is also the difficulty of discerning actual and consequential incidents at the polls.
Klein, ABC News’ Washington bureau chief, said, “I just think that overall, we’re dialed in to the challenges, and how to cover those challenges and communicate the realities as the night goes on.”
The network’s Protecting Your Vote has delved into a number of these issues, as it spotlights those who working to ensure election integrity.
Just as important can be putting things in context. Every presidential election, there are sporadic reports of problems with ballots or long lines. Klein said, “It’s easier for something like that to get blown up and maybe out of proportion, but it’s also possible that something like that is a huge deal, and it can be covered as such. We just don’t know and can’t prejudge it.”
Projections
The data and analytics that networks rely on to call races has gotten more sophisticated through the years, but projections have also become increasingly controversial, as if they are just as important as the final vote tally itself.
That proved to be the case in 2020, when Fox News and, hours later, the Associated Press, called Arizona for Joe Biden. It was the first major signal that Trump may be headed for a defeat, and a call that was met with a backlash against the network, with the fallout revealed in the release of internal emails and texts during Fox’s litigation with Dominion Voting Systems.
Arnon Mishkin, who runs the network’s decision desk, defended the call again in a recent interview with Politico, even though other news outlets waited for days to make the same projection. Biden won the state by just 10,457 votes. “I don’t feel any sort of pressure like, ‘Call it our way. Make our audience happy,'” Mishkin said.
Fox News uses data from VoteCast, developed by the NORC at the University of Chicago and the AP. It’s a probability-based, state-by-state survey of registered voters conducted by mail, phone and online. Other networks continue to use the National Election Pool — a consortium of ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — and Edison Research, which conducts exit polls on Election Day and at early voting locations, as well as surveys of voters by mail. That’s not all the data that the networks use, and it’s up to their decision desk teams to make the calls.
As has been the custom, no networks plan to call a state until polls there have closed.
Networks are expecting more frequent and efficient reporting of results at the county and state level which, combined with the survey and exit poll data, informs whether to call a race or not.
Given the past controversies over early calls, networks plan to spend a chunk of time explaining the data behind them.
“These are seven battleground states that are extraordinarily close, and they sort of count their votes differently, and so instantly informing our audiences about the vote that is in and where the current total stand, and what we know about what is outstanding and why, if this is the case in a lot of these battleground states, we aren’t able to make a projection,” Chalian said. “We just got to keep constantly informing our audiences, because they are obviously are coming to us with one big question: Who is winning? Who is going to win this election?”
Chalian said it was “impossible to predict” how long until a projection can be made, but noted that Detroit and Milwaukee also take some time to count their ballots in “near full form” — perhaps until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. on Wednesday. In Pennsylvania, they are unable to process mail ballots until the polls open on Election Day. That will impact the ability to make a call. “I wish I had a magic ball,” he said.
“You have to remain open that it takes time to truly see a clearer picture of what America is saying with their votes, and not to rush to judgment on that, because it’s not the way our election results come in. … It is going to take some time, to just understand editorially, what the country is saying.”
Chalian added that “what doesn’t change is the level of certainty, 99.9% that the second-place candidate will not overtake the first place candidate when every state is counted. That’s what makes a race projectable.”
Klein said, “Our role is going to be just to explain as the night goes on. ‘This is what we know. This is what we don’t know. This is what we’re seeing. This is what we are waiting on,’ to explain the difference between the state that reports all of its vote early, or its early vote late.”
Exit poll data is not gospel, something that can get lost in the anticipation of Election Day. There is the experience of 2004, when early exit poll information leaked, leading to a widespread belief of a John Kerry victory. Instead, as the returns came in, it was clear that George W. Bush was winning, and Kerry conceded the next day.
NewsNation’s Grzech said that “one of the positives this year is that we’re receiving that information more rapidly,” she noted, with counties providing more information “in a quicker amount of time.” “That way, there’s not this big change over and then people have questions about, ‘How did that happen?’ ” The network is relying on Decision Desk HQ to make its calls.
The biggest surprise out of election night would be for a winner by midnight ET and for Trump in particular to concede, as he already has raised claims of fraud. That’s why networks also are preparing for the days and weeks after the election.
NBC News’ John Lapinski and Charles Riemann recently ran through the timing of vote count scenarios, with the bottom line that the days of projecting a winner on election night “are almost certainly over.” The network has 30 “county captains” to precincts and voting centers where the count may be very close, while it has had an initiative called Vote Watch to monitor vote count issues and voter fraud claims, among other things.
MSNBC’s Jansing, who also has covered post-election challenges, said, “This is the Election Lawyer Full Employment Act. One of the things we learned is that there are courts that will deal with this.”
“In places where there are contested elections, there’s a system in place. Our democracy has put a system in place to deal with challenges.”
With the race so tight, network correspondents and executives have grown ever familiar to a typical query: Who is going to win? Chalian said, “I don’t think 20 minutes goes by without being asked that question, and I consistently have no answer.”
