At the start of election night, even Fox News Channel executives didn’t think Donald Trump had a decisive advantage over Kamala Harris.
“As of 5 p.m., the most likely outcome was a close election,” said Arnon Mishkin, the longtime head of Fox News’ decision-making desk. “Different people looked at the data and said this could tilt Trump, this could tilt Harris.”
But within hours, a different story unfolded, one that Fox News viewers had heard early on. FOX News was able to call more states faster than its competitors, including a critical early morning loss to the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania that all but decided the race in Trump’s favor. It will be done.
Why? Over the past decade, the company has invested heavily in new voting technology that relies more on on-the-ground data from each state than exit polls. The Associated Press is working with Fox News on a project called VoteCast, which uses large-scale online surveys of registered voters. “I think there’s some evidence that people who vote unilaterally, for whatever reason, are less willing to spend time investing or filling out surveys,” Mishkin says. “We’ve been seeing it for years.”
The deal benefited Fox News. In 2018, for example, the network was able to indicate 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 did not issue similar forecasts until later in the evening. In 2020, Fox famously called Joe Biden to Arizona, a prediction that sparked significant backlash from the network’s conservative fans, even though it was backed up by actual results.
Like many other news organizations, FOX News tends to reach a broader audience in the months before presidential elections. This dynamic could help the FOX network achieve its goals over the past few years. That means they can attract not just conservative viewers, but also independent and Democratic viewers, and use those viewers to generate support for a wide range of sponsors. Fox and its rivals are expected to lose subscribers over the next two years as consumers shift from terrestrial TV to streaming video, making it more difficult to demonstrate that a broad audience is interested. It has become important.
Still, the network still attracts strong attention during events like election night. The most-watched network last Tuesday was FOX News Channel, with 9.8 million people tuning in between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., according to Nielsen data. Still, fewer Americans overall are tuning in to TV news for election results, even as the results are far-reaching. Nightly viewership across all networks fell to 42.3 million, compared to 56.9 million in pandemic-hit 2020 and 71.4 million in 2016.
FOX News’ Mishkin believes the station’s voting technology is a key element in helping anchors and analysts quickly tell the definitive story to viewers. He said it was clear “from the beginning” that Trump and Harris were competing over a small number of undecided candidates. Mishkin said that by the time Biden dropped out of the race, “90% of voters knew who they were voting for.” “There was only 10% left.”
He believes the results of the 2016 election, when Trump won the White House for the first time, were more shocking to voters. Trump’s victory in 2024 “wasn’t exactly a shock, but most people thought it was close,” he said. Everyone knew he had a chance. ”
The executive team wants to make sure the process is improved by the 2026 midterm elections. He points out that it is increasingly important to know not only how many votes will arrive on election day, but also how many will arrive by mail in advance. That kind of information can be important in states where voting results are determined by residents of a few large counties.
He also wants to dabble in “more precinct-level data reporting,” but that could be difficult. “That can be really difficult. In most states, early voting is not recorded by precinct. We’ve had reports from prefectures.” When it comes to this kind of reporting, it’s clear that nuance is important.
