News outlets have a relatively traditional election night experience

For all the concern about a turbulent process that could leave Americans waiting days to find out who their next president would be, news outlets instead saw an election night that was close to tradition.

At 1:47 a.m. Wednesday, Fox News Channel became the first network to declare that Donald Trump had reclaimed the presidency. Other television networks and The Associated Press had Trump on the verge of becoming president again when he took the stage in Florida at 2:25 a.m. to announce victory. “This is, in my opinion, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said on stage at his victory party in West Palm Beach.

His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will speak later Wednesday morning, her campaign manager said, dispersing a crowd that had gathered to celebrate her at Howard University.

Broadcast, cable news channels, digital news sites and a streaming service – Amazon – covered the count steadily until Wednesday morning. Many of their journalists had warned viewers that determining the winner can be a lengthy process that can take several days, like in 2020.

Members of the media work ahead of a campaign party for Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris on the Howard University campus Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

But from the first clues provided by the poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern Time, the election night story trended methodically toward Trump. The dam broke at 11:18 p.m. Tuesday when the AP called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president.

Networks are evolving quickly

The networks quickly moved into the post-mortem phase.

“This looks a lot more like 2016 to me than 2020,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said, referring to Trump’s victory this year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Fox News Channel pointed to 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,” said Fox News’ Brit Hume, “it’s time for his enemies to stop.”

In his speech, Trump praised his Vice President JD Vance for “going into the camp of the enemy” for interviews on networks like CNN and MSNBC. “He completely wiped them out,” he said.

Hours earlier, as early exit poll results showed the unpopularity of President Joe Biden and Americans who had no clear idea of the direction the country was headed, CNN’s Chris Wallace said: “It would be a miracle if Harris could win with that.” .” His colleagues Dana Bash and Audie Cornish cautioned him against jumping to conclusions that Harris would be blamed, but Wallace sounded more prescient as the night progressed.

“She tried to do something as sitting vice president that had never been done before — succeed an unpopular president,” Todd said.

Analysts question the element of race

Voters line up to cast their ballots at Scranton High School in Scranton, Pennsylvania on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, an NBC News analyst, said the issue of race cannot be ignored. Some Americans were more comfortable with President Joe Biden, a white man, than with Harris, who was trying to become the first woman of color elected president, she said.

“Can you imagine a woman of color acting like Donald Trump, even for a day?” said CNN analyst Van Jones. “The kind of things he said, the kind of things he did, the way he insulted people. When you’re a person of color, you don’t feel like you have freedom.”

Trump had “license to just be an idiot, just to be a disgusting ass… and he gets to be president,” Jones said.

Because of the remarkably close polls before the election, the result was seen as a mystery that could take many days to solve. In his final prediction before the election, statistician Nate Silver said it was no better than a coin toss, giving Harris a very slight edge.

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The prescient New York Times newspaper Needle rated the contest a “draw” earlier in the evening, leaning slightly toward Trump. But it moved steadily toward Trump, to the point where at midnight the Times estimated Trump had a 90 percent chance of winning the presidency again.

Also at midnight, CNN’s count showed Trump leading Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – the so-called blue wall that was central to her winning strategy.

“It’s not impossible that Harris comes back and wins Pennsylvania,” said CNN’s John King, referring to the voter statistics. “But it’s becoming increasingly unlikely.” Within two hours, CNN awarded Pennsylvania to Trump.

The journalists who stood in front of the “magic boards” – King, Bill Hemmer at Fox News Channel, Steve Kornacki at MSNBC – spent much of the night detailing the results. They showed state-by-state and county-by-county numbers with Trump outperforming his 2020 campaign and Harris underperforming Biden’s results.

If anything, the networks relied too much on their numbers czars than on their reporters.

It was a relief to have results

Having actual results was a tonic for news organizations that had weeks — an agonizingly long one at that Day of voting – to talk about a campaign that has repeatedly shown itself in polls to be remarkably close. They tried to gain wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” said CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, trying to make sense of the little thing New Hampshire community That reported a 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early hours of the morning.

Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams had an unexpected guest at the California studio where he worked during his one-night appearance on Amazon’s Streamcast. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was supposed to report from Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach, but the former president’s team denied her permission to attend.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita described them in a post on the social media site

Neither Axios nor Politico confirmed reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

Networks are evolving quickly

Analysts question the element of race

It was a relief to have results

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