By Variety | Created at 2024-11-11 18:57:52 | Updated at 2024-11-18 04:16:52
6 days ago
At the start of Election Night, even executives at Fox News Channel didn’t think Donald Trump had a decisive edge over Kamala Harris.
“At 5 p.m., the most likely outcome was a very close election,” says Arnon Mishkin, who has directed Fox News’ decision desk for years. “Different people looked at the data and said this could tilt Trump and this could tilt Harris.”
Within hours, however, a different story was unspooling — and viewers of Fox News were early to hear it being told. Fox News was able to call many states earlier than many of its competitors, including a critical loss by the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania in the wee hours of the morning that largely decided the race in favor of Trump.
How so? The company made a big investment in new voter technology last decade that relies less on exit polls, and more on on-the-ground data from each state. The Associated Press works with Fox News in the venture, called Fox News Voter Analysis, which uses large online surveys of registered voters. “I think, for whatever reason, there is some evidence that people who vote one way are less open to spending time with investing or filling out a questionnaire,” says Mishkin. “We’ve seen that for years.”
The arrangement has benefitted Fox News. In 2018, for example, the network was able to make a call relatively early in that year’s midterm elections that Democrats were likely to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives. NBC News and CNN would not follow with similar projections until much later in the night. In 2020, Fox famously called Arizona for Joe Biden — a projection that generated significant pushback from the outlet’s conservative fans, even though it was borne out by actual results.
Like many other news outlets, Fox News tends to capture a broader audience in the months before a presidential election. That dynamic can help the Fox Corp. network deliver on what has been a goal for the past few years: collecting not just conservative viewers, but also independents and Democrats who can then be utilized to generate support of a wider array of sponsors. With Fox and its rivals all projected to lose subscribers over the next two years due to the migration of consumers to streaming video from linear TV, demonstrating a broadly engaged audience has become more crucial.
And yet, the network remains a powerful draw during events like Election Night. Fox News Channel was the most-watched network last Tuesday, according to data from Nielsen, with 9.8 million people watching the returns between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Even so, fewer Americans tuned in to TV news overall for election results, with the broader Election Night audience across all networks falling to 42.3 million people, compared with 56.9 million in a pandemic-stricken 2020, and 71.4 million in 2016.
Fox News’ Mishkin sees the outlet’s voting technology as a key element in helping its anchors and analysts get a decisive story to viewers quickly. It was clear “from the get go,“ he said ,that Trump and Harris were battling over a narrow pool of undecideds. By the time Biden stepped out of the race, Mishkin said, “90% of people, voters, knew who they were going to vote for, said Mishkin. “Only 10% were remaining.”
He believes the outcome to the 2016 election, when Trump first won the White House, proved more shocking to voters. In 2024, he said, Trump’s victory “wasn’t a total shock, but most people thought it was going be close. Everyone knew he had a chance.”
The executive would like to lock in some improvements to the process in time for the 2026 midterms. He points to the growing importance of understanding not just what votes come in on Election Day, but how many come in the mail ahead of time. In states where the voting tally can be dominated by residents in a few large counties, that sort of information could prove critical.
He also would like to get his hands on “more precinct-level data reporting,” but that could prove a challenge. “It can be really hard. In most of the states, the early vote is not recorded by precincts. It’s reported by county.” Clearly, when it comes to this sort of news coverage, the nuances matter.
