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By DAVID BAUDER and LYNN ELBER, Related Press
Media retailers preached endurance as the primary Election Day ends in the hard-fought marketing campaign between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden got here in, even because it ran counter to their instincts.
A harassed populace and flood of early voting had many observers frightened a few chaotic counting course of, main information organizations to warn towards leaping to conclusions.
“Counting may take a while this 12 months, and that is OK,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos mentioned on the high of his community’s protection. “Not understanding the result tonight doesn’t imply the method is damaged. It doesn’t imply the election is unfair. What’s most essential is that each citizen who casts a legitimate vote will get that vote counted, nevertheless lengthy it takes.”
As a result of completely different states will report the early vote at completely different occasions — and perhaps not even Tuesday night time — the tallies “may look considerably bizarre,” mentioned Fox Information Channel’s Martha MacCallum.
“We’re tonight placing collectively an infinite jigsaw puzzle however we don’t have the field that has the image on it,” mentioned John Dickerson, CBS Information analyst.
Shortly after Eight p.m. EST, with a big chunk of the Florida vote in and with Trump holding a slim lead there, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace tried to assuage viewers jitters.
“You may really feel the hopes and the desires of our viewers falling down, you’ll be able to hear liquor cupboards opening all throughout this nice land,” Wallace mentioned. “However Florida was not a state the Biden marketing campaign was relying on. Florida was not a state important to a Biden win.”
Information organizations promised to be candid in explaining why they had been declaring winners for one candidate or one other.
For the primary time, The Related Press mentioned it will write tales outlining its causes for particular person calls. An early declaration that Trump would win Kentucky, for instance, got here as a result of the AP VoteCast survey of voters and early voting statistics “happy expectations that the state’s longstanding political tendencies in favor of Republican presidential candidates will maintain,” the AP wrote.
But with knowledge — any form of knowledge — coming in, journalists and commentators who had obsessed over the marketing campaign for greater than a 12 months typically could not assist themselves.
After CNN reported a few of its early exit ballot findings earlier than any state had ended voting, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, one of many community’s commentators, mentioned, “I am taking a look at this, and I do not see a Democratic landslide in these exit polls.”
“It is 5:52,” anchor Anderson Cooper replied.
CNN’s John King repeatedly preached endurance but acquired granular when the very first outcomes got here in, specializing in a rural Kentucky county the place solely 8% of the votes had been reported.
Nate Silver, knowledge guru and founding father of the FiveThirtyEight weblog, tweeted out a warning: “These warnings we gave you about not paying an excessive amount of consideration to outcomes till you are positive a county is totally reported … you are already ignoring them!”
Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This materials is probably not printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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