The final answer may or may not come Tuesday, but news organizations that have spent months reporting on the presidential campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally have an opportunity to report the actual results.

Broadcast, cable news networks, digital news station websites and one streaming service — Amazon — all set aside Tuesday night to provide news from their own operations.

The actual results will be a relief to news organizations that have had weeks — and an extremely long voting day — to cover an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be remarkably close. The first indication of what voters were thinking came shortly after 5:00 PM Eastern when the networks reported that exit polls showed voters unhappy with the way the country was going.

It’s not yet clear whether that discontent will be blamed on Harris, the current vice president, or former President Trump, who was impeached in 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash said.

Trying to make sense out of anecdotal evidence

Otherwise, networks remained on Tuesday showing images of polling stations and trying to extract wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” said CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, struggling to make sense of the small New Hampshire community, which reported a 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early hours of the morning, Tuesday.

MSNBC assigned reporter Jacob Soboroff to talk to voters waiting in line outside a polling station near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. Soboroff was asked by a young voter to take a picture of her and Rudd.

On Fox News Channel, Harris’ surrogate Pete Buttigieg appeared for a controversial interview with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.

“Is this an interview or a debate?” Buttigieg said at one point. “Can I at least finish the sentence?”

Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams has started a one-night appearance on Amazon to deliver results, and he’s already had an unexpected guest in his California studio. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was scheduled to report from the Trump headquarters in West Palm Beach, but the former president’s team denied her credentials to attend.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, revealing the exile, described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site X. Palmeri told Williams that she accurately reported some anxiety in the Trump camp on who to vote for early.

Amazon said Palmeri was replaced at Trump’s Florida headquarters by New York Post reporter Lydia Moynihan.

Neither Axios nor Politico immediately confirmed reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately return a call for comment.

The New York Times strike affects an election night game

A notable media event on election night—the Needle on The New York Times website—was jeopardized by a strike by the paper’s technical workers.

The paper said Tuesday morning that it was unclear whether it would be able to include the feature on its website during election night coverage because it relies on computer systems maintained by the company’s engineers, including some who went on strike early Monday.

The pin, as the name suggests, is a graph that uses voting results and other calculations to indicate the probability that any of the presidential candidates will win.

First introduced in 2016, it has become a nightmare for supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who the Times determined had an 85 percent chance of winning the election. Readers watched as the Needle went from predicting a “likely” Clinton win early on election night, to “tossing” by 10pm Eastern to “leaning Trump” at midnight. Trump won the election.

The Times said that “we will only publish a live version of Needle if we are confident” that the computer systems it relies on for data are stable.

About 650 members of The Times’ Tech Guild went on strike early Monday.

David Bauder writes about the media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.

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