Ever since network television started covering presidential election nights in 1948, there have been only two occasions when viewers had to wait more than a day to learn the outcome.
The first was in 2000, when the country was on hold for five weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to the vote recounts in Florida and gave George W. Bush the White House over Al Gore.
Twenty years later, viewers sweated it out for four days before the networks put 270 electoral votes in President Biden’s column on Nov. 7, 2020. Pandemic restrictions led to officials counting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, slowing the process. Former President Trump’s legal challenges to the results and his attempts to block the certification of the vote became a saga that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The bumpy ride of 2020 has TV news operations preparing for more uncharted territory when ballot counting begins Tuesday night in the tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The 2024 election could be decided by narrow margins in as many as seven states, and Trump already is making accusations of voter fraud, as he did four years ago.
“If the polls are accurate, we’re in for a real doozy,” said Chris Stirewalt, political director for cable network NewsNation and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Executives across the network news divisions say they will deploy a greater number of correspondents throughout the swing states, some assigned specifically to deal with election security and protests. Attorneys with experience in election issues have become a very hot commodity in TV newsrooms.
“We really bolstered up our state election law expertise,” said Catherine Kim, executive vice president for editorial at NBC News. “They’re going to be working around the clock.”
NBC News and MSNBC will have a “reading room” at its Rockefeller Center headquarters where its team of legal correspondents and analysts will be ready to break down court cases if they come in.
CNN has hired Benjamin Ginsberg, the election lawyer who represented the Bush campaign in 2000. Fox News has added Thomas Dupree, an assistant district attorney during the Obama administration, to its team of legal experts.
CBS News will have a “Democracy Desk” to analyze voting-related matters and its CBS News Confirmed unit to fact-check reports. ABC has a “Ballot Watch” unit that will monitor election integrity.
Networks once prided themselves on being the first to declare the election results. Not anymore.
“Calling the election is treacherous territory,” said Rick Klein, vice president and Washington bureau chief for ABC News. “I think very few viewers know or care who projects a state first, but every viewer should care that they are projected right.”
Being first and right can even have its drawbacks in the current hyper-partisan environment.
In 2020, Fox News, which teams with the Associated Press and research organization NORC at the University of Chicago to analyze the results, correctly called Arizona for Biden at 11:20 (Eastern) on election night with roughly 80% of the vote counted. The decision, which shifted the unfolding narrative of the race, angered the Trump campaign and caused consternation internally at the network. The conservative-leaning channel even saw an exodus of angry viewers in the months that followed.
Fox News never wavered in its decision to award Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Biden days before its competitors. But this time around, viewers should be prepared to wait.
“There may not be projections at all on election night,” Klein said. “I think we just need to be honest about the extent of the uncertainty out there even as polls close and the results start to roll in.”
“We’ve come to expect the unexpected along the way, and that will be our approach on election night,” said Doug Rohrbeck, senior vice president, Washington news and politics, for Fox News.
While the process in 2020 was influenced by the tens of millions of people who had voted early, a group that leaned Democratic, no one is sure what the impact will be this time around.
“Republicans, smarting from their loss in 2020, have embraced early and absentee voting,” Stirewalt said. “And former President Trump no longer talks about the problem of mail-in ballots, or certainly not as much. So I think we had better proceed into election night with a lot of humility and a real openness to the possibility that assumptions we’ve had in the past might be wrong.”
As charges of irregularities in the voting are likely to pop up, news organizations are expected to be transparent.
In previous elections, the political scientists, analysts and statisticians who make up the teams that call the races appeared on camera only when absolutely necessary. This time CBS News plans to give viewers a closer look at the process of calling states. NewsNation is partnering with Decision Desk HQ to handle its vote counting and will have a camera fixed on the room where the counting happens.
There will be more correspondents and producers deployed in key counties inside the swing states showing the official process.
“I think we’re going to see more live counting of ballots than ever before,” said Mary Hager, executive editor for politics at CBS News.
There is also another possible scenario for election night 2024: The prognostications could be off, as they have been in the last three presidential election cycles, with the possibility of a winner declared after the polls close on the West Coast.
It happened in 2012 when President Obama was running neck and neck with his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in the final weeks of the campaign. Obama ended up winning the popular vote by four points and swamped Romney in the electoral vote count 332 to 206.
“It could be an electoral landslide in either direction,” Klein said. “No one should be surprised by either outcome.”
Stirewalt believes viewers will get some guidance from the results in North Carolina and Georgia, where polls close before 8 p.m. (Eastern) and which have a reputation for counting votes quickly.
“We will get an immediate core sample of what the electorate looks like, and we’ll start to figure out between 7:30 [and] 9:30 which way the polls were wrong, or maybe they were right and it’s just a very close race,” Stirewalt said. “If the polls are wrong, they tend to be in the same direction everywhere.”
Stirewalt’s hope is that whatever the outcome, it doesn’t replicate the drawn-out battle of 2000 between Bush and Gore, which happened during a comparatively more civil time in the nation’s politics.
“I do not think we have the institutional strength and confidence in our leaders to go through an ordeal like that,” he said.