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For all the concerns about a tumultuous process that could leave Americans waiting for days to learn who its next president would be, news outlets instead experienced an election night Tuesday that hewed close to tradition.
From the first hints provided by exit poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time, the election night story moved methodically in Donald Trump's direction. The Associated Press called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president at 11:18 p.m. ET. By midnight, The New York Times' predictive Needle judged Trump with a 90 percent likelihood of winning the presidency over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Also by midnight, CNN's count had Trump leading Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the so-called blue wall that was central to her strategy for victory.
The Harris campaign announced at 12:45 a.m. that the Democrat would address the nation later Wednesday, quickly breaking up an audience that had gathered at Washington's Howard University.
Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news sites and one streaming service — Amazon — covered the count steadily into Wednesday morning. Many of their journalists had warned viewers that determining the winner could be a protracted process.
Instead, they moved swiftly into postmortems for Harris' campaign.
“This looks a lot more like 2016 to me than 2020,” NBC's Chuck Todd said, a reference to Trump's victory that year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Fox News Channel pointed to exit poll results that showed Trump making gains among young voters and Latinos. “The Biden-Harris people pushed them into Trump's open arms,” said Fox's Dana Perino, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush.
Hours earlier, when the first exit poll results showed the unpopularity of President Joe Biden and Americans with a dim view of where the country was headed, CNN's Chris Wallace said that “it would be a miracle if Harris could win with that.” His colleagues, Dana Bash and Audie Cornish, warned him of jumping to conclusions that Harris would be blamed for that, but Wallace sounded more prescient as the night progressed.
“She was trying to do something as a sitting vice president that had never been done before — succeed an unpopular president,” Todd said.
While votes continued to be counted, Fox News' Brit Hume said that Harris' “chance of pulling this off would be the most amazing thing we have ever seen.”
Due to remarkably close pre-election polls, the outcome was considered a mystery that could take many days to resolve. In his last pre-election prediction, statistician Nate Silver said it was no better than a coin flip, giving an ever-so-slight edge to Harris.
“The future of American democracy is on the line tonight,” ABC News' David Muir said at the start of his network's coverage.
The Times' Needle had begun the night rating the race as a toss-up, leaning slightly toward Trump. A few hours later, The Times said Trump had a better-than-even chance of winning all seven battleground states.
For much of the night, the journalists who stood before “magic boards” — John King on CNN, Bill Hemmer on Fox News Channel, Steve Kornacki on MSNBC — took up much of the airtime with granular reports on results. State-by-state, county-by-county, they showed numbers where Trump was outperforming his 2020 campaign and Harris lagged behind Biden's results.
The preseance of actual results were a relief to news organizations that had weeks — and an excruciatingly long day of voting — to talk about an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be remarkably tight. They tried to extract wisdom from anecdotal evidence.
“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” CNN's Alyssa Farah Griffin said, making efforts to draw meaning from the tiny New Hampshire community that reported its 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early morning hours.
MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff talked to voters waiting in line outside a polling place near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. Soboroff was called on by one young voter to take a picture with herself and Rudd.
On Fox News Channel, Harris surrogate Pete Buttigieg appeared for a contentious interview with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade. “Is this an interview or a debate?” Buttigieg said at one point. “Can I at least finish the sentence?”
Former NBC News anchor Williams, during his one-night leading Amazon's streamcast appearance, had one unexpected guest in the California studio where he was operating. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was supposed to report from Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach but was denied credentials to attend by the former president's team.
Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site X. Palmeri told Williams she had accurately reported some anxiety within the Trump camp about who was voting early.
Neither Axios nor Politico would immediately confirm reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately return a call for comment.
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.