One year ago, NewsNation was the first outlet to announce that President Donald Trump won the White House back. While the outlet’s Political Editor and anchor, Chris Stirewalt, won’t guarantee they will be first for this year’s elections, he does assure viewers they will be the most transparent and accurate, in part thanks to their partner Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).
“As members of the media, we have to build trust [with the audience], and we have to honor that,” Stirewalt affirmed. “And you can’t fool around. You can’t screw up.”
According to Stirewalt, the transparency DDHQ provides allows NewsNation viewers “to see what’s happening, and they can also engage honestly and openly with the results.”
With just 180 different elections on Tuesday, November 4, it’s a relatively small number, but many hold high importance. “On a typical election night, you’re moving inventory, you make a call, [then] make another call, and make another call,” Stirewalt said. “[But the small number of elections] lets us savor a little bit and dive deeper into the data.”
There will be some elections that are easy to call because “the priors tell us a lot,” according to The Hill Sunday anchor. This is “because partisanship is a hell of a drug.” However, it also has to do with the counting capabilities of each state. “Virginia does a great job. We thank you, Virginia. [The state] has well-run elections, and it’s efficient.”
Stirewalt noted that states like New Jersey could take a lot longer to call. “New Jersey does not have the count speed that some other places have. If I had to guess right now, we may still be counting New Jersey, and looking at New Jersey, even at a time when we’ve called the race for Proposition 50 in California.”
Proposition 50 seeks to authorize temporary changes to congressional district maps in the Golden State. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll claims 60% of California voters are looking to approve the proposition. It’s one of the many races Stirewalt will be watching closely and asking, “Did polling consistently miss turnout for working-class voters?”
Chris Stirewalt affirmed white, working-class voters are “the hardest votes for polling” because they “have the lowest response rate [for polls].”
Another key (and sometimes overlapping) voting bloc with a low response rate is Republicans. “There is a demographic, cultural, and I think partisan bias against polling,” Stirewalt explained. “And it just makes it tough [to predict] these races because there’s a silent majority vote out there.”
A veteran journalist, Stirewalt got his first gig at 16, writing baseball box scores for The Wheeling Intelligencer. “I did not go looking for a job in sports. I went looking for a job, and they put me in this group. And I found my people.”
Comparatively, Stirewalt says covering sports is similar to politics, but the likeness also causes some problems. “We do treat politics, right? My team versus your team, I win, you lose. In one sense, that’s okay,” the political analyst said.
The problem with this is that “people watch and consume politics in the same way they would root for their team.” Stirewalt elaborates, saying this mentality might be why there is such an appetite for biased news.
“I’m a fan of the West Virginia University Mountaineers,” he explained as an example. “I want the Mountaineers to win, and I want them to succeed. If they are not having a great season, not having a good time like this year, I am not going to be interested in consuming media coverage that emphasizes how bad the Mountaineers are this year. I don’t want that.”
“We want bias,” Stirewalt affirmed. “We want to be flattered. And we are willing recipients of condescension because we want our feelings to be protected. That makes it very hard to have a grown-up discussion about self-government.”
Stirewalt remarked, “If we want to have self-government, we are obliged to work with and deal with people from the other team, and we are obliged to see the humanity, decency, and patriotism of people who are trying to beat us in elections.”
This is also what makes journalism a vocation and not just another job. “We have to honor those [vocational journalistic] principles [of presenting all sides of a political debate]. We also have to regularly interact with people with whom we disagree.”
These interactions, Stirewalt said, should not be “the funhouse mirror version [of the other side of politics], not to hold up ridicule and mockery, but to sincerely engage with the opinions of Americans with whom we sincerely disagree, and that’s hard. People don’t like to do it.”
For those looking to follow in Stirewalt’s footsteps, he suggests, “Don’t do it. Find another line of work.” However, if you do feel the vocation calling, Stirewalt suggests, “Don’t get a journalism degree.” Instead, “get a broad, useful, intensive education.”
He does not mean to offend any of the incredible journalism schools and even encourages students to join the school paper and take journalism classes. Stirewalt believes, “I can teach someone how to write an inverted pyramid news story. Someone can teach you how to edit. Someone can teach you how to set up reporting. Those skills can be taught.”
Stirewalt went on to say, “I can’t teach you the origins of the War of 1812, and I can’t explain the political pressures around the Vietnam War. I can’t. And I don’t have time.”
After getting a good broad education, “find someone who will pay you, and it will not be much,” Stirewalt said bluntly and honestly. “Go get the dirt under your fingernails and start grinding it and doing it. You will learn so much more doing journalism than you will [by] being taught about things that lack application in the real world.”
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