Four years ago, Chris Stirewalt was at the center of a political firestorm.
As a member of the Fox News Decision Team, he spent the 2020 election night huddled with other data nerds to decide when states could be called for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
It was Fox’s call for Arizona, made far earlier than competitors, that rattled the campaign and became a major news story in and of itself, with repercussions that were felt across the political and media landscape.
For 2024, Stirewalt won’t be huddled in a back room. He will be front and center, as an on-air analyst for NewsNation, the upstart cable news channel owned by the local TV giant Nexstar.
This time, he wants to bring viewers inside the room, to try and reverse engineer how TV networks have called elections for the better part of the last 75 years.
“There was a sort of Wizard of Oz component, that in some other room, in some other place, there were magical beings that were doing this work of forecasting the outcome of a presidential election,” Stirewalt tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think in our fractured and atomized media world, without giants bestride the earth anymore, that works. I think you have to show people what you’re doing, and I think you have to be transparent about what’s up.”
So Stirewalt and NewsNation intend to pull back the curtain, and in a contrast to what the other networks are doing, will forego in-house forecasting entirely. Instead, NewsNation will let Decision Desk HQ make its calls. They will be completely independent from NewsNation, but the channel will have cameras in their office at Georgetown Law School, letting viewers and the anchors (including Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas, and Leland Vittert) see what they are doing.
Stirewalt suggests that it is a setup that will make for a marked contrast to other TV networks with their own in-house teams.
“It’s been personally a little challenging for me, because I like to be in it, right? This is what I love. I’ve been doing elections since 2010 and this will be the first election since then that I have not been in the stew, helping to make calls and being part of that,” he says. “But I think this is better. I think it’s better because if you want to make sure that commercial, mercenary or partisan feelings are not influencing how races are getting called, it helps if you just keep it clean, keep it separate. They’re over there. They’re doing their thing. We can talk to them. We can watch them. We can ask them questions, we can do all that stuff, but they’re going to do what they’re going to do, and we’re going to report on it, and we’re going to try to provide context and explanation.”
There is, in fact, a precedent for what could go wrong, and Stirewalt saw it firsthand. As has been well-documented by now, members of President Trump’s inner circle sought to pressure Fox to change its Arizona call. Ultimately, of course, Fox did not retract its call of Arizona, and Biden won the state.
But in a TV news landscape full of competition, the NewsNation political editor is also betting that his style of election coverage will resonate, a tough bar to top given the partisanship that dominates cable news.
“Personality drives a lot of television news, argumentation, spin and attempts to defeat spin drive a lot of what we see on television. But this is the week when the nerds rule, where there is no more spinning to be done,” Stirewalt says. “When the polls close and it’s all over but the count, at that point, people’s opinions don’t matter that much. We’re beyond persuasion and motivation, and now we’re down to trying to tell people what has happened and tell them what has happened accurately and as soon as possible.
“I think America wants to know, and I think what we can do is meet them where they are, and instead of continuing to try to spin them or put talking heads on to soothe them, we can tell them what’s going on,” he adds.
And it could end up being a make or break moment for NewsNation as well. 2024 will be the channel’s first as a 24-hour news network (the channel rebranded from WGN America in 2021), and in a moment of media tumult, Stirewalt seems to think there is an audience that wants what NewsNation is selling.
“I don’t know how big that audience is in America that would like aspirationally fair news and would not like to be cosseted and flattered and lied to, but it’s not zero,” he says.
“I think if we can be transparent and independent, then we will have done a lot of good for ourselves and hopefully for the country,” he adds. “Election coverage is an opportunity for NewsNation to make good on the promise, the idea, that there is a substantially underserved market for Americans who would like to have their news removed from partisan silos. And if there’s ever a time where people want that, it ought to be an election that normal people don’t need to be comforted or deceived when it’s time to count votes. What they should want, or what I hope they want, is to be treated like grown-ups, and I think we can do that.”