How NewsNation Called The Election First — Thanks to Two News Veterans Ousted By Fox
At 1:22 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning, NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo announced live that former President Donald Trump would be the 47th President of the United States, citing projections from the network’s partner, Decision Desk HQ, and making it the first news outlet to call the 2024 presidential election.
It would take some older, well-established networks hours more to call the much-anticipated election that ended in a loss for Vice President Kamala Harris and made Trump the first president since Grover Cleveland to be re-elected to the White House after being voted out. The call from Fox News, second to announce Trump’s victory, came in some 20 minutes later at 1:47 a.m. ET.
“It’s a big challenge,” NewsNation political editor Chris Stirewalt said in an interview about the call. “There are no easy answers… but that does not mean there are no simple answers. And the answer, when it comes to calling races is pretty simple, which is: You need the best data and you need the best analysts and you go when you know.”
And go when they know, they did. Stirewalt spent Tuesday night on air at NewsNation, reporting on the election results and DDHQ’s projections as they arrived.
He was joined by Bill Sammon, the former Washington editor at Fox News who worked with Stirewalt for years until the controversial 2020 call of Arizona for Joe Biden led to both of their departures from the network.
That early call had devastating consequences for Fox News. Though it was ultimately correct, it drew the wrath of the Trump campaign and Fox’s own viewers. Stirewalt, then a Fox politics editor, defended the call on air. Within months, both he and Sammon were pushed out by Fox over viewer outrage that brought down ratings. The repercussions of that call were felt once again this year, when industry insiders said networks would be more cautious in making bold projections.
Stirewalt was later tapped by Cherie Grzech, the president of news and managing editor at NewsNation, to serve as their political editor and host of the weekly show The Hill Sunday. (Disclosure: Mediaite founder Dan Abrams hosts a show on NewsNation.)
The overarching strategy going into election night, Stirewalt told Mediaite with a laugh, was to be the first to be right.
Unlike its more established cable news competitors, NewsNation eschewed an in-network decision desk, instead leaning into their partnership with DDHQ, an independent entity. DDHQ ended up being the most bullish outfit in making calls, which gave it a competitive advantage. On social media and across the news industry, its projections were cited as a consequence of their speed.
The network was also the first to call North Carolina for Trump around 9:30 p.m., Georgia shortly thereafter, and later the Senate for the GOP.
How did they do it? Stirewalt attributes this success to DDHQ’s forecast model, data flow, and art of picking the correct target precincts to draw their conclusions.
He compared the experience of piecing the data together to a 3D optical illusion poster: You must stare at it for a long time to make out the shape (using a dinosaur in his analogy) until, suddenly, you can distinguish the shape (of the velociraptor) and know what you’re looking at.
Once you know exactly where to look, Stirewalt said, the poll becomes a math problem. Analysts can make a computational call by taking note of the remaining number of votes to be reported relative to the existing margin.
If the margin is too great, then the vote can be called.
“Harris was getting Joe Biden margins across all of Pennsylvania, but what Donald Trump was able to do was, he was outpacing his margins from 2020 by anywhere from 4 to 6 percent, especially in key counties like Bucks,” Scott Tranter, director of data science for DDHQ, told Cuomo on air Tuesday night. “So, in other words, VP Harris did what she needed to do, but Donald Trump just got a few more votes where he needed to and that made the call basically pretty clear right around 1 a.m. this morning.”
NewsNation gave viewers a glimpse into how DDHQ’s decisions were made, setting up cameras in their offices at Georgetown Law School. Sammon, Stirewalt said, was his “secret weapon.” He hunkered down at DDHQ and served as the liaison between them and NewsNation.
“For us, independence and transparency were the right answer,” Stirewalt said, “I think if we want to build trust in an aspirationally fair medium, the way to do that is to show your work.”
He added: “In a time of siloed partisan media where people are very prone to look for places that will flatter them and maybe even deceive them to spare their feelings and keep their attention, then the competitive advantage for NewsNation has to be that we’re not going to do that, and we’re going to talk to people like grown-ups and we’re going to tell them the good news or bad news as soon as we know it and try to be as fair as we can about it. That’s got to be our brand.”
