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For all the concerns about a tumultuous process that could leave Americans waiting for days to learn who its next president would be, news outlets instead experienced an election night that hewed close to tradition.
Fox News Channel was the first to declare Donald Trump had reclaimed the presidency at 1:47 a.m. on Wednesday. Other television networks and The Associated Press had Trump on the precipice of returning to presidency when he took the stage in Florida at 2:25 a.m. to declare victory. “This is, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said onstage at his victory party in West Palm Beach.
His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, would speak later Wednesday morning, her campaign manager said, dispersing a crowd that had gathered to celebrate her at Howard University.
Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news sites and one streaming service — Amazon — covered the count steadily into Wednesday morning. Many of their journalists had warned viewers that determining the winner could be a protracted process that could take several days, like it had in 2020.
Yet from the first hints provided by exit poll results shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time, the election night story moved methodically in Trump’s direction. The dam broke at 11:18 p.m. on Tuesday, when the AP called the first of seven battleground states, North Carolina, for the former president.
Networks Forge Forward Quickly
Networks Forge Forward Quickly
The networks moved quickly into the post-mortem stage.
“This looks a lot more like 2016 to me than 2020,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said, a reference to Trump’s