Fox News to Pull Back Curtain on How It Makes Election Day State Calls
Fox News anchor Bret Baier was at dinner in New York on Sunday night, at an Italian haunt favored by The Five co-host Harold Ford Jr.
Baier was grabbing dinner with Ford and fellow Fox contributor Alex Castellanos, when they heard a familiar voice approach the table.
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“I turned around and Alec Baldwin and his wife [Hilaria] walked up, and he said, ‘I just want to introduce myself. I really enjoyed playing you,'” Baier recalls. Baldwin, of course, portrayed Baier on Saturday Night Live just two weeks ago, spoofing the Fox anchor’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
“He was lovely, his wife was lovely. We had a nice little chat,” Baier continued. “And I said, ‘Harold, why didn’t you take a picture?’ He said, ‘Come on, we’re bigger than that,’ and I said, ‘I’m not bigger than that,’ I would have liked that picture.
“Only in New York,” he added with a laugh.
Baier’s interview with Harris may well emerge as a defining moment of the 2024 election season. On Fox Corp.’s earnings call Monday morning, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch called it out, saying that it “set a new bar for political interviews” with its 9 million viewers.
But the SNL parodies also underscore the extent to which eyes will be on Fox News on Tuesday night and in the hours and days beyond. Fox is by far the most watched cable news channel, and one of the most watched TV channels, period. Its lineup of conservative opinion shows, panel shows like The Five and programs like Baier’s have major influence and impact, and how they approach election night will be felt across the media and political ecosystem.
Sitting in a ground floor studio at Fox’s New York headquarters Monday, Baier and his election night co-anchor Martha MacCallum expressed confidence in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that they will deliver compelling TV, even if the outcome remains uncertain for some time. They also acknowledged the sense of dread and anxiety the country is feeling that comes with an event with such high stakes.
“This is an emotional story for Americans. People have been stressed about this election, and I think they trust us,” MacCallum says. “We have been erring on the side of over-explaining the stuff that we’re looking at, so that people — we know they’re walking by, they’re watching for 20 minutes and they’re coming back again — we want to make sure that we go through it so that it is actually useful to them.”
“Can we hope that it’s gonna end on election night or the next morning? Can we just maybe put it out there in the universe, either way it goes?” Baier quips.
Of course, Fox, like all the other networks, is preparing in the event that the race continues through Wednesday, Thursday or beyond.
“We’ve dealt with close, close elections before, you can imagine things that happen. You can imagine places that have questions about their ballots, or that they stop counting, or some candidate declares victory before we’ve called the race,” Baier says. “So we have a game plan, we have a blueprint, roughly, but again, we roll with the punches.
“If it does drag on, you’ve just got to cover it,” he adds. “We’ve done that before, and it is in that vacuum that bad things sometimes happen, and you have to cover all that, too. And so you have to get your mindset past tomorrow [Election Day] and Wednesday morning.”
But first, election night. And Fox has no shortage of made-for-TV tools that it plans to roll out.
During a technical rehearsal Monday, anchor Bill Hemmer was testing out his touchscreen “Bill-board,” and his new augmented reality data visualization capabilities, which will look to viewers at home like the votes from a state are floating in the middle of the studio.
A giant video chandelier was lowered from the ceiling, giving anchors new ways of showing data tickers, while prerecorded video of New York’s 6th Avenue played behind the anchor desk on an enormous two-story screen.
“One of my favorite new toys that Bill Hemmer has is the one that shows you North Carolina, for example, and how far blue it was in, say, the last four elections, and the two times that it crosses over into red, just barely over the line for Trump. Same thing in Arizona,” MacCallum says. “When you look at how small some of these changes are, Wisconsin has been decided by a handful, a few thousand votes in the last couple of elections. So I think that really shows people what a heavy lift it is in some of these states to get from one side to the other to win them.”
Indeed, Fox News, like many others, intends to pull back the curtain somewhat on how and why it makes calls, something top of mind for many in the media business after 2020, when the channel’s call of Arizona — made well before anyone else — became a news story in and of itself.
“I think we learned a lot,” Baier says. “Especially if it’s close and it’s a really late night, and we’re waiting on some states, we are in the mindset of lifting the curtain and taking them to the people that are looking at the data and having them on and saying, ‘Why are we not able to make this call specifically?’ and then have that person say to Bill, ‘Go to so and so county,’ and then we can see it visually as the data decision desk person is saying, ‘Here’s where we are, we’re stuck with this.’
“I think that’s another thing we’ve learned over time, is the more we show, the more transparent we are, I think the better it is for the viewer,” Baier adds.
“We’re very data driven, we’re watching the news as it unfolds, we understand the importance of just pacing things for the viewers and taking them through it step by step,” MacCallum says. “We have a lot of amazing new graphics that I think are going to make it even more clear, things that pop up and show you the heavy population concentration around Philadelphia, for example, and how it went last time.
“We’re just keeping track of everything that’s going on and trying to convey it to our viewers in a way that puts it in context and tells them the story,” she adds.
But after the votes are counted and the election is certified, the story will continue, and that is something that both Baier and MacCallum are already thinking about.
MacCallum says she wants to know more about the inner workings of the Biden White House in the wake of the president’s disastrous June debate, which ultimately led to his exit from the race.
“I think we’re going to learn a lot about the Biden White House story and what happened after that debate, and how that shift really happened with her moving into that nomination,” MacCallum says. “I think there’s really so much of that story still to be told.”
And Baier is holding out hope that the winner, be it Trump or Harris, will put in real effort to try and unify the country. He wrote as much in an op-ed Monday, and underscored it in the conversation with THR.
“I think the after-story is about bringing the country together, because there’s some families that can’t even talk to each other at Thanksgiving dinner,” Baier says, adding that he wrote the op-ed “just to put it out there that unity — no matter who wins — really needs to be our message.
“I think it will be the tone and tenor once you get a winner and covering it as we cover anything else in a respectful, fair way,” he says. “But that message of bringing the country together, I think, is going to be important, not just for us to project, but for the candidates themselves to talk about, because the country’s divided.”
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