Opinion | Who won the 2024 presidential election coverage?

CNN’s John King and MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, who showed viewers where the results were headed well before official numbers came in

And the winner of the 2024 election is … well, we have a tie.

The winners are: MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki and CNN’s John King.

These two experts of the big maps were on top of their games Tuesday (and Wednesday morning), performing masterfully and completely owning election night coverage.

CNN essentially turned its broadcast over to King. Jake Tapper served as host. The network had a team of reporters across the country. Later, Anderson Cooper moderated the panel discussion. But it was King and his map that carried the coverage.

Both King and Kornacki moved at lightning speed, using their fingers to flip from this state to that one, and from this county to that one. The expertise they showed and the authority they spoke with made viewers instantly experts on the voting habits of Pennsylvanians and Georgians and North Carolinians.

They offered incredible insight, flipping from the current vote total, to what was left outstanding, to how it all compared to 2020 and 2016. Well before official numbers came in, thanks to the analysis of King and Kornacki, viewers could quickly see where results were headed.

So when the numbers did come in, viewers already knew what they meant and who benefited from it.

Nothing is more valuable for a viewer than to feel smarter after watching an analyst. That’s what Kornacki and King do. They make you feel smarter, and in the know.

Other networks offered up their maps, and it was fine.

But King and Kornacki owned the night.

Speaking of that, here’s what Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote: “​​One point about the media coverage: All three cable news networks have what I like to call ‘county czars’ — you know, the guys who break down all the state votes county by county. There’s Bill Hemmer at Fox News, very smooth. John King at CNN, encyclopedic. And there’s Steve Kornacki at MSNBC, the industry standard in this category. I just watched him zip through many of the places where Harris is underperforming Biden across the electoral map, with this particular segment focusing on the boroughs of New York City. No Harris supporter could watch the presentation without coming away very dispirited. Given MSNBC’s audience, many surely did.”

What a comeback

Late Tuesday night, as it appeared Donald Trump was on his way to winning the election, there came this realization: What a comeback.

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said, “Donald Trump is on the precipice of the greatest comeback in American political history. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

Karl went through Trump’s checkered resume. The impeachments, losing the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 insurrection, the felony charges, a Republican stumble in the 2022 midterm election.

And there Trump was early Wednesday morning, looking like the favorite to return to the White House.

On Fox News, anchor Bret Baier said, “We’re not there yet. We’re not calling these states. We are going to wait and see how these raw vote totals go. But, you would rather be him. The path is getting clearer for him right now. … That he’s here at this moment, from Jan. 7, 2021, until now — is probably the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we have ever seen in the history of politics.”

Slow down

At 8:58 p.m., after word about slow vote counting in Georgia, CNN’s John King said, “That tells me to tell the people at home to slow down on the popcorn or make some more because we’re going to be at this a while. Maybe brew an extra pot.”

However, thankfully for the health of the nation, we’re not waiting until the weekend after Election Day as we did in 2020.

Good insight

NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur tweeted Tuesday night that an NBC News exit poll showed Trump making double-digit gains with Latino voters. At one point on Tuesday evening, Latino voters were breaking 53% for Harris and 45% for Trump. Compare that to 2020 when Latinos went 65% for Biden and 32% for Trump.

Good advice

During NewsNation coverage, Chris Cuomo said he got a call from his daughter with some good on-air advice. Cuomo told co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas, “She heard that I was something about women and the vote, and she was basically calling me just to tell me to shut up and let you talk. Always good advice. Always good advice.”

Red and blue

NewsNation political editor Chris Stirewalt said something on the air that has become abundantly clear about our country: “Right now, I am observing that red places are getting redder. Blue places are getting bluer. Rural precincts are getting more Republican. Suburban precincts are getting more Democratic.”

Say it ain’t so, Joe

A week before the election, Donald Trump spent three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Kamala Harris was invited to appear on the podcast, but she ended up not going on after some failed negotiations. Harris agreed to go on Rogan’s show for an hour if he was willing to go meet her on the campaign trail. Rogan said he only wanted to do it at his studio in Austin, Texas, with no time limits.

So it never happened.

Did that actually end up meaning anything? Well, here’s one story, for what it’s worth. Reporting for MSNBC from Arizona, Gadi Schwartz said the Rogan factor was something she heard about. She talked to two voters at Arizona State University.

Schwartz said, “One of them said that he was on the fence until — he said when Kamala did not go on the Joe Rogan podcast, that was what influenced his vote. He ended up voting for Trump, but he said that he was open to listening to Kamala on the podcast. And when she didn’t again, not the — not necessarily all the issues, but the fact that he said she didn’t seem like a real person because she couldn’t talk for an extended period of time.”

Swing and a miss

Over the weekend, a poll from The Des Moines Register/Mediacom shockingly showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by a margin of 47% to 44%.

The poll is traditionally accurate and well-respected among pollsters and pundits, leading to even more of a surprise.

Many questioned whether Harris could actually win Iowa, but the poll gave Harris supporters a shot of optimism — that maybe it was a hint of good things elsewhere in the country.

It turned out to be a big miss.

As of early this morning, with 95% of the vote in, Trump’s lead in Iowa was 56% to 42%.

Phrase of the night

MSNBC’s Michele Norris, reporting from Harris headquarters late Tuesday night, said Harris and staff had come up with a phrase about how they were feeling: “Nauseously optimistic.”

As the night went on, it probably just became “nauseous.”

Powerful comment

This from New York Times columnist David French around 11 p.m. Tuesday night when Trump’s chances of being elected were looking pretty decent: “I can only imagine the feeling in Kyiv right now. The nation is giving everything to fight Russian aggression, and now Ukrainians face the probability that the arsenal of democracy will abandon them at their hour of great need.”

Columnist Nicholas Kristof added, “The intelligence community believed that Russia was intervening in the election to assist Trump, and if Trump wins, then Putin wins as well. Back during the Chechen war, Putin showed he could outlast critics, and he bet on the theory that he could outlast Western critics when he invaded Ukraine. If Trump is elected, then Putin may be proved right.”

Stewart’s reaction

Jon Stewart ended his election night special coverage on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” by ripping into pollsters with a few choice words I can’t say here.

After calming down, Stewart said, “What we know is that we don’t really know anything. And that we’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is, and the truth is, we’re not really going to know (expletive), and we’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization. And I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong.”

The Daily Beast’s Michael Boyle noted, “​​He then showed a few clips of pundits’ predictions after previous elections. When Barack Obama won in 2008, they predicted that the country had moved past race as an issue. In the 2020, they said that Donald Trump would be exiled from American politics. None of these statements were correct, Stewart argued.”

Then Stewart added, “But this isn’t the end. I promise you. This is not the end. We have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight, and continue to work, day in and day out, to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country, that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

To be fair

While many will want to rip the pollsters, the bottom is most polls had the race as very tight and all within the margin of error. Even in those polling stories, pollsters emphasized that they really didn’t know who would win.

And, as the night stretched well into the morning, there still wasn’t a declared winner. So, you could argue, the polls (for the most part) were spot on.

For those upset with the polls, it could only be because they were reading into the polls what they wanted.

Last word

Even though a winner had not been declared, CNN’s Van Jones delivered a sobering message. Jones was responding somewhat to comments from CNN contributor and former Trump adviser David Urban, who said that the apparent Trump victory was a way for “regular people” to tell the so-called “elite” that they didn’t like being talked down to and that there needed to be a “reckoning” that Trump isn’t so crazy with his ideas about the economy and border and so on.

Jones responded with, “I’m thinking about the people who are not a part of anybody’s elite who are hurting tonight. There are African American women who know a little bit about being talked down to, who know a little bit about having their economic dreams crushed, who tried to dream a big dream the past couple months. And tonight they’re trading in a lot of hope for a lot of hurt. They were hoping that, maybe, this time one of their own could be seen worthy. And, once again, they’re facing rejection. And that hurts. They thought tomorrow morning they’re going to walk out with their shoulders back a little bit. They’d be able to breathe for the first time. They feel like they belong someplace. They did everything they knew how to do. And it’s going to be harder than it should be for them to hold their heads up.”

Jones also mentioned others who are suffering because of an apparent Trump victory, such as those in the trans community and immigrants.

“It’s people who woke up with a dream,” Jones said, “and are going to bed with a nightmare.”

Other interesting links and tidbits from Election Day …

• The Guardian’s Robert Tait with “Los Angeles Times owner cites Gaza war as a reason not to endorse Harris.”
• CNN’s Hadas Gold and Kristen Holmes with “Trump campaign denies and revokes journalists’ election night credentials after critical coverage.”
• The New York Times’ famed “needle” returned Tuesday night on the heels of the Times’ tech workers going on strike. My colleague Rick Edmonds wrote about the “needle.”
• OK, here’s a tweet that made sense, at least if you were dizzy from watching hours upon hours of TV coverage. This came out early Wednesday morning as it appeared Trump was on his way to victory: “So if you’re a 2020 denier, what’s the new gospel, they just forgot to do it this time around?”

More resources for journalists

• It’s time to apply for the Leadership Academy for Women in Media.
• Consider this dynamic, in-person, five-day workshop for new newsroom managers.
• Reinvigoration for the unsung heroes of the TV newsroom.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.