How Different News Networks Covered Election Night’s Democratic Dominance | Analysis

“Fox funeral.”

That’s how one former TV news executive described the atmosphere on Fox News’ Election Night broadcast Tuesday as Democratic victories piled up and Republican hopes of holding Congress faded.

The phrase was pointed, but it captured something larger about Election Night television as the Democrats flipped both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The networks were following the same returns, and by the end of the evening, the same political story was taking shape. What differed was how they told it — and how quickly they moved from counting votes to explaining what went wrong for Republicans and what comes next for Democrats.

In the early hours, the coverage had much in common: county comparisons, warnings about incomplete returns and careful distinctions between leads and projected winners. As Democrats’ gains became clearer, those similarities gave way to different editorial instincts. CNN leaned on its reporting and data, MS NOW explained its calls, Fox debated Republican losses, NBC conveyed their scale and CBS turned toward the political fallout.

At CNN, John King used the Magic Wall to compare early results in Indiana and Kentucky with previous elections, showing where Democrats were outperforming earlier margins while reminding viewers that Election Day votes could change the picture.

Jon Klein, the former president of CNN/U.S., thought his old network had the strongest overall presentation.

“I think CNN has been best — a combo of real-time results, analysis and coverage across the country, plus energy that captures the drama of the moment,” Klein told TheWrap. “They felt bigger and more all over the story than the others.”

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow was more explicit about how a result became a call. She distinguished individual races, preliminary assessments of unresolved contests and projections about control of Congress. The network generally relied on the Associated Press for individual races, she explained, but could disagree, while making its own projections about which party would control the House and Senate.

It wasn’t glamorous television, but it was useful when early Democratic leads still needed to be separated from actual victories.

Fox News initially focused on the math, too. Bill Hemmer walked viewers through hypothetical Republican paths to a Senate majority, and the network found room for lighter moments, including a check-in from a bar in Cocoa Beach, Fla.

As the results worsened for Republicans, however, the discussion increasingly turned toward why. Harold Ford Jr. pointed to voters’ frustration with how government was working for them, while other commentators cited economic growth and employment.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was more confrontational. “I respect this network, but I’ve got to tell you guys you’re missing the plot,” he told the Fox panel as they attempted to explain the mounting Republican losses, pointing to the war in Iran, rising prices and healthcare costs. His remarks drew a sharp response from Trump, who criticized Fox on Truth Social for giving airtime to Democratic voices.

And late in the evening, Donald Trump even called into Fox News and spoke with Bret Baier, who pushed back when the president tried to blame the network’s polling for the results.

“I read in Fox that I’m not popular,” Trump said on air via phone. “The Fox polls are terrible, you oughta get yourself a good pollster because your pollster’s the worst.”

Baier interjected: “But tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the polls showed.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, I can just tell you about speaking for myself,” Trump responded before adding, “Fox has gotten me wrong for 12 years, but I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.”

The exchanges reflected competing explanations for why Republicans lost so many races, including a disagreement over whether the administration had addressed voters’ economic concerns.

On NBC, Steve Kornacki (who was simultaneously live on YouTube throughout the night, drawing over 300,000 viewers) grew increasingly emphatic as the results came into focus.

“Absolute carnage for Republicans,” the election analyst and subject of many memes declared. “Democrats are getting everything they asked for.”

With Savannah Guthrie and Tom Llamas anchoring, Kornacki used the Big Board to show how dramatically the electoral map was shifting. In Nueces County, Texas, where Trump had won by nearly 12 points in 2024, Democrat James Talarico led the early Senate vote by roughly the same margin — an approximately 24-point swing.

Kornacki cautioned that Election Day ballots remained outstanding, but the shifts were appearing across multiple counties. His increasingly blunt assessments reflected how far the coverage had moved from the cautious interpretation of early returns.

The networks also reached their House projections at different moments. Decision Desk HQ projected Democrats would take control, with NewsNation reporting the call at 9:11 p.m. ET. MS NOW made its projection nearly 50 minutes later, followed by CNN, NBC and CBS over the next 12 minutes, according to TheWrap’s monitoring.

CBS was already asking what Democratic gains would mean. By 9 p.m., its election model suggested Democrats were on pace for about 252 House seats, although its anchors stressed that the estimate could change. It did: By Wednesday morning, the estimate was up to 259 House seats for Dems.

Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik acknowledged a difficult night and suggested Republican redistricting efforts might have been a strategic overreach, while warning against reducing every race to one national explanation. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel argued Democrats had a chance to attract traditional Republicans disillusioned with Trump. CBS’s anchors pressed him about whether progressive Democrat Angie Nixon’s unexpectedly strong showing in Florida pointed to another lesson.

ABC News, led by David Muir, examined what the shifting balance of power would mean for Trump’s remaining two years in office, tracking Democratic victories in Georgia and bringing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy into the discussion.

For all the drama in the results, the traditional television productions didn’t always feel as big as the occasion. Klein said several networks appeared to have smaller, quieter sets and fewer correspondents in the field than in past election cycles, with CNN an exception. That was his impression, not a measure of staffing or spending.

At the same time, coverage extended beyond the main broadcasts. NBC offered its Kornacki Cam on YouTube and a Peacock multiview experience; CBS ran a separate data-focused Nerd Show; and MS NOW streamed VelshiCast. The spectacle hadn’t necessarily disappeared. Some of it had moved to other screens.

Tuesday gave every network the same big story. It didn’t give them the same broadcast.

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