TV News Election Night Likely to Carry Over for Days and Days
For NBC News, Election Night starts before the sun goes down.
Beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 5th, pairs of anchors ranging from Tom Llamas and Hallie Jackson to Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt to Craig Melvin and Kate Snow will each staff a block of coverage of results from the 2024 presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. NBC will offer its stations 24 hours of coverage overall, and stream it as well, and will do so starting at a time that in the past might still have been reserved for local programming — and will potentially launch two hours ahead of its direct broadcast competitors.
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“We are going up earlier than we ever have on the network, and we are staying up continuously longer than we ever have on the network,” says Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News. Look for Guthrie to sign back on at 6 a.m. for an extra-long “Today” broadcast after co-anchoring primetime coverage the night before. And while hard plans are in place to cover the election until 5 p.m. the following day, producers are ready “ for days of coverage, if need be,” Rodriguez adds.
While a determination of which candidate wins the election is certainly possible Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning, all the major TV-news outlets are prepared for the process to take days — just as it did in 2020. With mail-in voting embraced by more people, and rules for tabulating those ballots varying from state to state, the chances of a hard decision in the hours immediately after voting closes are slimmer than in the past. That means cable news outlets will likely have to stay in wall-to-wall coverage for days while their broadcast-news counterparts will need to jump back into special-report mode at any moment.
“We are prepared to go from ‘GMA’ to ‘GMA’ if need be” on Wednesday and into Thursday, says Marc Burstein, senior executive producer of ABC News’ special-events coverage, describing what could be 24 hours of coverage on Disney’s flagship TV outlet – after many hours the previous evening.
There are new reasons to keep Election Night coverage going into a series of Election Days.
A presidential election cycle is what typically brings the biggest and broadest audiences to news. That can be a boon at a time when advertisers have grown wary of sponsoring opinion hosts and newscasts that deliver tough headlines about climate change and polarized electorates. If audiences like what they see, they may stick around for more. “We always know that our job doesn’t end on Election Day, and that’s only when we start gearing up for the transition, for certification, for the Inauguration, for the first 100 days,” says Jessica Loker, vice president of politics for Fox News Channel. “In a lot of ways, our job is just beginning here.”
Some outlets that aren’t known for election coverage hope to make a name for themselves.
CNBC, for example, plans Election Night coverage focused on potential effects on the markets, with Carl Quintanilla anchoring from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange starting at 7 p.m. Contessa Brewer will take up anchor duties at midnight until the network’s signature “Squawk Box” starts at 5 a.m. – an hour earlier than usual.
NewsNation, meanwhile, will host the first presidential-election coverage in the Nexstar-backed outlet’s short history. “I think you have to be ready to go through the entire week,” says Cherie Grzech, president and managing editor of news and politics. “We will make sure we can sustain coverage throughout the week, 24 hours if necessary.” A key element of coverage will be taking viewers to Georgetown Law School, where NewsNation will follow calls made by Decision Desk HQ, an election-results analysis site. Bill Sammon, a former Fox News veteran who left that organization following the 2020 election, during which conservative viewers were dismayed by the outlet’s accurate prediction that Joe Biden would win Arizona, will play a key role in that facet of NewsNation’s coverage.
There’s already a template for such conditions that was struck during the 2020 election, when the vote from Pennsylvania was among the last to be counted. “We went back on across the board whenever we knew something was about to happen or when we knew there was a significant development that needed to be reported to the American people,” says Mary Hager, CBS News’ executive editor for politics. And while no one will keep anchors in the studio “for days and days and days,” reporters who are monitoring events in battleground states likely will stay close to their posts until the count is done.
An extended vote-counting process was a bug in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic spurred record numbers of mail-in votes. Now, many top producers think the early votes have given rise to a new feature in election reportage. “I think we will not see as high a rate of mail-in ballots as we saw at the height of Covid,” says David Chalian, CNN’s political director. “But it’s going to be more so than any election other than 2020. It’s a new reality of American life.”
Keeping viewers interested and coming back for more can mean having an “A-team” of a network’s best-known anchors at the ready. Fox News viewers, for example, expect to see election news delivered by the team of Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, while CNN devotees have in recent cycles grown familiar with Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer, along with a panel led by Anderson Cooper. And what would MSNBC’s coverage be without Steve Kornacki manning an interactive map loaded with data about constituents in every county of the U.S.?
“Steve has a window if he needs to take a few winks,” and the network has other personnel who can fill in, says Rashida Jones, president of MSNBC. Still, she says, “Kornacki is going to be on the set when that big moment happens.”
There will be shift changes at various hours. After CBS News’ initial Election Night coverage, “we have fresh talent, fresh ears, eyes and brains for the morning after,” says Hager. If the counts take days to finish, Hager expects the news division to break into programming with ease, when necessary.
The longer the election counts go on, the more opportunity surfaces for disinformation about what’s taking place. Some of the extended coverage may offer simple blocking and tackling various theories that start to take root on social media. Both CBS News and ABC News have teams assigned to examine the origins of specious information or problems with voting in specific areas. “Certainly, it wasn’t an issue ten years ago, but it has been an issue,” says ABC News’ Burstein. Key to keeping things in perspective, he says, are efforts to continually “explain what may happen, what we don’t know, why we don’t know it” and why the scenario is unfolding as it should or should not.
Amid all the chaos, the networks also have to be ready for something really odd: Order. What if the election is called just a few hours after the polls close? “There could be a scenario where it gets called on Election Night. We could get the call at 3 a.m. It could get called at 5 p.m. the next day. It could come days later,” says NBC News’ Rodriguez. “We have to be ready for all of that.”
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