NewsNation is counting on data to draw viewers in on Election Night.
The Nexstar-backed news outlet, which continues to play upstart to more established cable competitors like Fox News MSNBC and CNN, is once again tapping the election-data gurus at Decision Desk HQ who helped NewsNation make the first call of the 2024 presidential election and gain some notice by doing so. Executives hope the alliance will bear similar fruit this year.
“On Election Night, the data is more important than the anchors,” says Leland Vittert, one of the NewsNation personalities who will lead the network’s coverage Tuesday evening.
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Election Night 2025 will offer a broad array of information from every mainstream TV-news outlet, whether it be the expected — Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum anchoring Fox News coverage and Rachel Maddow leading MSNBC — or the offbeat — a streaming-only CNN Election Night hang oi with Harry Enten, Charlamagne tha God and Ben Shapiro. But in every case, the networks hope to draw a broader audience interested in what the evening’s tallies might mean for the nation – and perhaps convince them to stick around for more in days to come.
NewsNation will be the only one of TV’s main coterie news outlets not to use the Associated Press’ calls on Election Night. The A.P. has a strong reputation for accuracy during election coverage and recently unveiled an agreement that will have it provide its data not only to Fox News Channel, which it already had as a customer, but also ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, all of which used Edison Research in 2024.
Decision Desk HQ “has the hot hand when it comes to calling elections, having called the last two presidential elections before any of our competitors,” says Bill Sammon, senior vice president of Washington D.C. content for NewsNation and its sibling The Hill. The voting-analysis firm has moved away from the exit polls upon which many mainstream news outlets count in favor of forecasting built on demographic trends, turnout estimates and other kinds of data.
Sammon has a lot of experience with Election Night calls, having been involved with the decision at Fox News to call Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020 and a call for Ohio to go to President Obama in 2012.
And while Election Night 2025 isn’t the biggest or most crucial, it has a lot to offer to news aficionados and politicos. News outlets are likely to cover what may be an historic mayoral race in New York City; two red-vs-blue showdowns for the gubernatorial seats in New Jersey and Virginia; a controversial race for Virginia’s attorney general; and, in California, a vote on Proposition 50, which could disenfranchise Republicans and is seen as a countermeasure to red-state legislatures redrawing voter maps to keep a majority in the U.S. House.
“There’s enough drama here,” says Vittert.
There’s also some room for the unexpected. Correspondent Brian Entin has hit the road in a special NewsNation RV in a bid to interview people who rarely get to be heard on national news programs on their take on issues that are critical with voters. Entin, who is driving through Utah, Wisconsin. Vermont, Ohio and New Jersey, says he and his team have already pulled off at a highway truck stop to hear what’s important to long-haul truckers.
“You pick up on the pulse of what’s going on in a different way,” Entin says, whether it’s by talking to farmers about soybean exports or people in Utah about the effects of gerrymandering.
Above all, says Vittert, NewsNation hopes to show it’s prepared for anything that might happen. “We go through every possible scenario that you never hope you have to deliver on the air,” he says. “We have thought thorough a lot of things. Yes, you are prepared for everything, and I don’t think we are going to have to call the race for the Republican candidate in the New York mayoral race, but that doesn’t mean we are not prepared to do it.”
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