It’s wanting doubtless, given the traditionally shut nature of the 2024 presidential race, that main TV networks gained’t have the ability to make a name on election evening—not that that might cease Donald Trump.
“Based mostly on past performance,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper tells me in an interview, the community is anticipating Trump declaring victory “if he’s up on election evening, regardless that all of the votes haven’t all been counted.” Nonetheless, Tapper and his colleagues stay open to any variety of eventualities as outcomes are available in, as a result of, he says, “no person has any concept how that is going to finish.”
Because the candidates make their remaining dash, CNN is “gearing up” for its “Tremendous Bowl,” as Tapper describes it, a culminating political occasion capping a turbulent election cycle for which the community has, at instances, performed a vital function. CNN hosted 13 city halls courting again to the beginning of the Republican primaries, together with a broadly panned Trump occasion, and on Wednesday evening will air a Pennsylvania occasion with Vice President Kamala Harris. Notably, the community produced the June face-off between President Joe Biden and Trump, which Tapper calls the “most consequential presidential debate in historical past.”
“It has by no means occurred earlier than {that a} candidate’s efficiency was so troubling he was pressured by his personal occasion to drop out of the race,” says Tapper, who co-moderated that occasion with fellow CNN anchor Dana Bash. This election cycle, Bash says, has “actually been wild.”
“I really feel very fortunate as anyone who loves historical past and clearly loves journalism to be collaborating within the journalism that made a lot historical past,” says Bash, who additionally scored Harris’s first joint interview with working mate Governor Tim Walz. As for that pivotal Biden-Trump debate, she says, “who knew this was going to have the monumental impact that it did.”
Whereas the community tried to safe a second debate, this time between Harris and Trump, the previous president refused to have interaction, not assembly the deadline set by CNN for a proper response and saying it was “too late.”
“As each a journalist and as an American, I’m in favor of debates, and the extra the higher,” Tapper says, including that Trump’s refusal is a “disgrace” however “has to do with political technique.” Trump, he says, “made the calculation that it doesn’t harm him” and that “when it comes to cost-benefit, he’s higher off not doing it.”
In the meantime, Harris is about to look at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday for a city corridor moderated by Anderson Cooper and that includes a reside viewers of “persuadable and undecided” voters. The chance was additionally prolonged to Trump, to no avail, as the previous president declined the community’s invitation whereas lately collaborating in occasions hosted by Fox News and Univision.
One main change at CNN because the 2020 election has taken place behind the scenes. This marks the primary cycle below the management of CEO Mark Thompson, who was appointed to the function final yr following the ouster of Chris Licht, who had succeeded Jeff Zucker, the community’s boss over the last presidential election evening.
Tapper factors out that whereas Thompson on the helm is a comparatively new improvement, key members of the community’s editorial management group have remained the identical. Tapper name-checked Virginia Moseley, a longtime exec who was named to the brand new function of govt editor earlier this yr, and Eric Sherling, one other CNN veteran who now serves as govt vp of US programming, as amongst those that have performed essential roles in guiding CNN’s political protection behind the scenes. “I believe Mark has religion in us and has us targeted on the job at hand,” the anchor says.
“I don’t suppose that it’s going to be demonstrably completely different from how we’ve been inspired to do issues prior to now,” he provides. “It’s a reasonably tight ship and it’s nonetheless chugging away, no matter who the captain is.”
