As Americans brace for a high-stakes election night, major US television networks are preparing for the intense pressure of calling states in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. With the final results potentially taking days, or even weeks, to be confirmed, networks will carry the heavy responsibility of managing real-time reporting, disinformation, and public expectations in a landscape still scarred by the 2020 election controversies.
In 2020, President Joe Biden’s victory announcement was delayed by four days. This year, with seven key swing states in play, viewers are expected to be glued to screens as each state’s results trickle in. According to Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research, which supplies exit polls and vote counts for major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC News, and CNN, “We may not have sufficient data to make projections until late in the evening or even days after Election Day.” Critical states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for instance, will only begin counting early votes on Election Day, which could lead to delayed reporting of official results.
Adding to the complexity, TV network decision desks, manned by teams of statisticians and analysts, face enormous pressure to call states accurately while balancing the need for speed in delivering information to viewers. Costas Panagopoulos, a former NBC decision desk member, notes, “The stakes are very high, and there’s tremendous pressure to capture viewers with timely information, but sacrificing accuracy for speed is a significant risk.”
The memories of past election night mishaps still linger. In 2000, networks prematurely declared Florida for Democratic contender Al Gore before retracting the call—a blunder that still haunts network credibility. And in 2020, Fox News stirred controversy by calling Arizona for Biden hours after polls closed, a decision that reportedly infuriated the Trump campaign. To prevent similar issues, media organizations now employ advanced analytics incorporating exit polls and early voter surveys to improve the accuracy of their projections.
Ben Ginsberg, an election lawyer, anticipates the possibility of another “red mirage,” where early tallies favor Republicans before Democratic-heavy mail-in ballots shift the count—a phenomenon seen in 2020. With concerns over potential disinformation on social media, TV networks are doubling down on transparency and rigorous data analysis to mitigate misinformation about alleged election fraud. CNN will feature its famous “magic wall” with John King breaking down voting trends, while NBC News has published a detailed guide on how it will track data from over 100,000 polling stations, covering 610 races, including Senate and House elections.
While delays in results may lead to speculation, Ginsberg warns that “delays themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy.” He adds that any candidate prematurely declaring victory should be dismissed as engaging in “political posturing.”
