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 that hewed close to tradition.
Fox News Channel declared Donald Trump had reclaimed the presidency at 1:47 a.m. on Wednesday. Broadcast networks and The Associated Press had Trump on the precipice of returning to the presidency when he took the stage in Florida at 2:25 a.m. to declare victory. “This is, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said onstage at his victory party in West Palm Beach.
His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, would speak later Wednesday morning, her campaign manager said, dispersing a crowd that had gathered to celebrate her at 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 that could take several days, like it had in 2020.
Yet from the first hints provided by exit poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time, the election night story moved methodically in Trump's direction. The dam broke at 11:18 p.m. on Tuesday, when the AP called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president.
The networks moved quickly into the post-mortem stage.
“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.
“Maybe,” Fox News' Brit Hume said, “it's time for his enemies to stop it.”
In his speech, Trump praised his running mate, JD Vance, for “going into the enemy camp” for interviews on places like CNN and MSNBC. “He absolutely obliterated them,” he said.
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.
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, an NBC News analyst, said the element of race could not be discounted. Some Americans were more comfortable with President Joe Biden, a white man, than Harris, who was attempting to be the first woman of color to be elected president, she said.
“Can you imagine a woman of color acting the way Donald Trump acted — even for one day?” CNN analyst Van Jones said. “The kinds of stuff that he said, the kinds of stuff that he did, the way that he would insult people. If you're a person of color, you don't feel like you have the freedom.”
Trump had “a license to just be a fool, just to be an obnoxious ass ... and he gets to be president,” Jones said.
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 New York Times' predictive Needle judged the contest a “toss-up” in the beginning of the evening, leaning slightly toward Trump. But it moved steadily in Trump's direction, to the point where the Times by midnight judged Trump with a 90 percent likelihood of capturing the presidency again.
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.
“It's not mission impossible” for Harris to come back and win Pennsylvania, CNN's John King said, looking over voter statistics. “But it's becoming mission improbable.” Within two hours, CNN awarded Pennsylvania to Trump.
For much of the night, the journalists who stood before “magic boards” — King, 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.
If anything, the networks relied too much on their numbers czars than on their reporters.
The presence of actual results were a tonic 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.
Former NBC News anchor Brian 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.