Trump seems set to reclaim White House. Here’s what the US media got wrong in the run-up

Before results are called by most media outlets, Donald Trump has already declared his victory, saying it has given him a “great feeling of love” and claiming the nation has given him “a powerful mandate”.  “Look what happened…Is this crazy?”

In the US, it is the media that calls the election since election results are not officially declared until weeks after polling day due to the absence of a central election commission, decentralised counting, and the electoral college system. In the American political system, the results are not decided by the national popular vote but the electoral college which makes swing states decide the poll. Each candidate needs 270 votes in the electoral college to secure victory.

The US election is the most-watched poll contest this year, considering the ramifications for global trade and other international affairs. The Guardian recollected how many front pages considered the potential for chaos in the wake of a closely contested election, with headlines such as “the world hangs on the choice of Americans”.

The Associated Press projected that Republicans have won control of the US Senate, retaking the chamber for the first time in four years. This gives the Grand Old Party a lead role in confirming the next president’s cabinet as well as any Supreme Court justice if there is a vacancy, it said. While AP pegged Trump’s number at 267, CNN projected 266, close behind the 270-mark. The race for the house, however, is still up for grabs. For Republicans, it’s a chance to gain full control of Congress while for Democrats, a house majority could grant significant checks on the GOP’s power.

Trump claimed the crucial battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, leaving Vice President Kamala Harris only the narrowest of paths to the White House. Trump’s adopted home state of Florida reportedly gave him his first major victory.

Fox News had already declared Trump victorious. The Associated Press projected at 11.20 pm (US time zone) that Trump had won his first battleground state of North Carolina. But Fox News host Bret Baier, before 10.30 pm, reportedly declared Trump “probably the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we have ever seen in the history of politics”, according to the New York Times.

While Trump seemed poised to become the second individual in US history to get two non-consecutive terms as president, the New York Times reported that the crowd at Kamala Harris’s election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, DC, had already thinned by midnight. Cedric Richmond, a former congressman and campaign co-chair, told gathered supporters they would not hear from Harris that night. “She will be back here tomorrow to address not only the [Howard] family, not only to address her supporters, but to address the nation.”

Once he is sworn in as president, Trump has vowed retribution and revenge against his perceived enemies and critics. He has also vowed the biggest deportation of migrants in history, more tariffs on foreign trade and promised to end the war in Ukraine and Middle East.

AP or CNN are yet to project a clear winner in the presidential race though Trump had leads in several key states. 

Several global leaders, including Indian PM Narendra Modi, French president Emmanuel Macron, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu have already congratulated Trump.

What the media got wrong

A study by US media watchdog Media Matters found that in the weeks leading up to the election, top print newspapers were covering Trump on the front page “considerably more than Vice President Kamala Harris”. “These findings follow claims from mainstream media that voters did not know Harris well enough.”

Media Matters compiled and analysed front page print articles from five of the top print newspapers by circulation from weekday editions between October 15 and October 30.

“Of the 305 front page articles we looked at, 35 percent, or 107, were related to the 2024 presidential election. The New York Times and Washington Post led the election coverage, with 32 and 33 articles, respectively. And of those 107 front page articles about the election, 43 (or 40 percent) were about Trump, 23 (or 21 percent) were about Harris, and 23 (or 21 percent) were about both.”

Another Media Matters piece pointed out how three big corporate broadcast media outlets — ABC, CBS, and NBC — “routinely failed to adequately cover the policies at stake in the 2024 election, neglecting time and again to inform their millions of collective viewers about important news and developments on issues spanning from abortion to retirement security”.

Meanwhile, Jon Allsop, in a newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that the result could “very well distort our collective memory of how this election played out in the press by loudly imposing the lessons of hindsight on a messy picture, perhaps based on little more than a relative handful of votes in a handful of states breaking one way or the other”.

The piece noted that it’s often been hard to escape the conclusion that our understanding of this race has been “funneled less through actual voters’ mouths than what political elites – and the campaign consultant class, in particular – imagine those voters to be thinking”.

“Last week, Astead W Herndon, a reporter at the Times who has been speaking in depth with members of the electorate on his podcast, The Run-Up, took aim at one manifestation of this trend – an excessive flurry of stories about late nerves inside the Harris campaign – in an interview on The Ringer’s Press Box podcast. In the 2022 midterms, Herndon noted, there was a late ‘lurch’ toward the narrative that ‘Republicans are gonna kick Democrats’ ass,’ creating ‘wildly out of whack expectations’ among the voting public. ‘Anything past you should be prepared for every form of result is irresponsible,’ he added.” 

“Herndon attributed the prominence of this type of story, in particular, to an ‘instinct to try to make sure your coverage points to the correct results’; drop enough campaign insiders are feeling nervous articles about both sides, and you can hedge against the uncertainty of the outcome. This, too, points to a broader problem with coverage not just of this election, but of elections in general – the over-allocation of journalistic attention to figuring out what’s going to happen, and how an outlet might preempt it, as opposed to what’s already happening. Throughout this cycle, I’ve written frequently about shortcomings in coverage of the latter, particularly when it comes to Donald Trump and his rhetoric. I won’t recapitulate here (and there have, in certain respects, been recent improvements in the urgency of such coverage), but paying these threats more heed was always a better use of our time than astrology.”

Watch our mini-series on the US polls here.

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