At approximately 1:46 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Fox News anchor Bret Baier officially confirmed what, by then, pretty much everyone still watching the network at that hour knew was eventually going to happen. “The Fox News decision desk can now officially project that Donald Trump will become the 47th President of the United States,” Baier said. (The Associated Press and most major networks have not yet called the race.)
“The former president’s comeback will be complete with a win in Wisconsin, a state that he narrowly lost four years ago,” intoned co-anchor Martha MacCallum, noting that Trump was the second president in U.S. history to win non-consecutive terms in office. “Voters expressed deep frustration with the Biden administration, and former President Trump—and the future President Trump—overperformed in urban areas, particularly with men, proving that the strategy that they doubled and tripled down on, over the course of the last few months, absolutely succeeded and brought him back to the White House.”
Although it took Fox News until almost 2 a.m. to make its official call, by midnight or so, most of the people on the network had already basically realized that Trump was going to win, even if they couldn’t necessarily say so explicitly. At the various election parties and Trump events from which the network’s correspondents were periodically reporting, the mood was one of jubilation. Trump’s supporters on the scene in states such as Georgia, Nevada, and Tennessee were chanting, and whooping, and making the same inferences as the rest of us: In two and a half months, Donald Trump would likely be returning to the White House.
In Fox’s New York studios, the mood was a bit more sedate. From midnight onward, most of the network’s anchors and panelists were still trying to be professional, while also just waiting for the opportunity to safely gloat. While everyone on set for Fox seemed to sense the intense likelihood of a Trump victory, the then-unresolved electoral votes of the so-called “blue wall” put them in a position where they were spending hours mostly just pointing out Trump’s widening margins and leaving it up to viewers to connect the dots.
Bill Hemmer, the network’s designated map guy, called up counties in swing states and walked through scenarios that could deliver Trump the presidency sooner rather than later. Baier questioned whether a narrow, unlikely Harris victory would even count as a mandate. “You call it the ‘bro strategy,’ or whatever, it seems to have paid some dividends up there,” said Fox decision team member Daron Shaw right before 1 a.m., referring to Trump’s efforts to turn out the male vote in the upper Midwest states: “I mean, it’s still, we’re still waiting—but, you know, it’s looking pretty good for him.”
Karl Rove doodled on his stupid whiteboard and talked about what viewers could glean from the numbers they already had. “We’re pretty good at saying ‘89 percent of the vote in, or 95 percent of the vote is in, and—that turns out to be accurate. It’s very rare—I can’t imagine one instance where we’ve said, where we’ve looked at a number and seen 90 percent of the vote in, or 85 percent of the vote in, and that turned out to be grossly off,” Rove said right around 12:30 a.m.
Rove, of course, was famously called out on-air by then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly on election night 2012 for being grossly off with his read on the outcome of that year’s election. But he wasn’t wrong on Tuesday night, and as the fact of Trump’s victory finally sunk in, the network’s anchors and panelists were finally free to do what they’d wanted to do for hours. “For Democrats, they were discussing the possibility of running the table in battleground states,” Baier said. “David Plouffe, with the Democratic campaign, the Harris campaign, suggested that just yesterday. Now, it is possible that Donald Trump runs the table with these states, and builds on a big landslide electoral win.” God help us all.
Update, Nov. 6, 2024, at 2:15 a.m.: This post was updated after Fox News called the race.
