It’s looking likely, given the historically close nature of the 2024 presidential race, that major TV networks won’t be able to make a call on election night—not that that would stop Donald Trump.
“Based on past performance,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper tells me in an interview, the network is anticipating Trump declaring victory “if he’s up on election night, even though all the votes haven’t all been counted.” Still, Tapper and his colleagues remain open to any number of scenarios as results come in, because, he says, “nobody has any idea how this is going to end.”
As the candidates make their final sprint, CNN is “gearing up” for its “Super Bowl,” as Tapper describes it, a culminating political event capping a turbulent election cycle for which the network has, at times, played a crucial role. CNN hosted 13 town halls dating back to the start of the Republican primaries, including a widely panned Trump event, and on Wednesday night will air a Pennsylvania event with Vice President Kamala Harris. Notably, the network produced the June face-off between President Joe Biden and Trump, which Tapper calls the “most consequential presidential debate in history.”
“It has never happened before that a candidate’s performance was so troubling he was pressured by his own party to drop out of the race,” says Tapper, who co-moderated that event with fellow CNN anchor Dana Bash. This election cycle, Bash says, has “really been wild.”
“I feel very lucky as somebody who loves history and obviously loves journalism to be participating in the journalism that made so much history,” says Bash, who also scored Harris’s first joint interview with running mate Governor Tim Walz. As for that pivotal Biden-Trump debate, she says, “who knew this was going to have the monumental effect that it did.”
While the network tried to secure a second debate, this time between Harris and Trump, the former president refused to engage, not meeting the deadline set by CNN for a formal response and saying it was “too late.”
“As both a journalist and as an American, I’m in favor of debates, and the more the better,” Tapper says, adding that Trump’s refusal is a “shame” but “has to do with political strategy.” Trump, he says, “made the calculation that it doesn’t hurt him” and that “in terms of cost-benefit, he’s better off not doing it.”
Meanwhile, Harris is set to appear at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday for a town hall moderated by Anderson Cooper and featuring a live audience of “persuadable and undecided” voters. The opportunity was also extended to Trump, to no avail, as the former president declined the network’s invitation while recently participating in events hosted by Fox News and Univision.
One major change at CNN since the 2020 election has taken place behind the scenes. This marks the first cycle under the leadership of CEO Mark Thompson, who was appointed to the role last year following the ouster of Chris Licht, who had succeeded Jeff Zucker, the network’s boss during the last presidential election night.
Tapper points out that while Thompson at the helm is a relatively new development, key members of the network’s editorial leadership team have remained the same. Tapper name-checked Virginia Moseley, a longtime exec who was named to the new role of executive editor earlier this year, and Eric Sherling, another CNN veteran who now serves as executive vice president of US programming, as among those who have played critical roles in guiding CNN’s political coverage behind the scenes. “I think Mark has faith in us and has us focused on the job at hand,” the anchor says.
“I don’t think that it’s going to be demonstrably different from how we’ve been encouraged to do things in the past,” he adds. “It’s a pretty tight ship and it’s still chugging away, regardless of who the captain is.”
Meanwhile, the network’s signature “Magic Wall,” which debuted in 2008, is getting a facelift for the big night. “With each election since, we have made significant advances in how the Magic Wall powers our ability to bring audiences real-time results and the necessary context around what those results tell us as the election unfolds throughout the night,” CNN’s political director, David Chalian, tells me. “In 2024, we are turbocharging those advancements with CNN’s new digital Magic Wall, which now puts all of those critical real-time results and crucial historical and trend context directly in the hands of every single user.”
Speaking of historical context, Tapper says that viewers should be prepared to close out election night without a definitive result. “That’s not so unusual,” he says, referencing the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, and 2020. “It might take several days.” He notes that “the tighter the race, the longer it’s going to take,” adding that CNN will “be doing 24/7 coverage for as many days as we need to be doing it.”
“Here’s what we know, it’s going to take as long as it takes,” Bash says. If the results turn out to be as tight as everyone is expecting, she adds, voters and viewers should “just let the process play out, because it could take a while.”
Every election night, Bash tells me, is “intense” and “anxiety-provoking” for viewers, though her hope is that the network can provide a place to “take a breath” and find out “what’s really going on,” amid a surge of misinformation across social media. “We have been acutely aware of misinformation, disinformation, and we’re doing our best to just tell the facts as we know them. Nothing more, nothing less.”
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