“Jump ball.” “Coin flip.” “Toss up.” “Dead heat.” “Deadlocked.” On TV and online, political analysts are running out of ways to say the presidential race is effectively tied.
But they have to keep repeating it. As CNN’s Dana Bash said on “Inside Politics” Tuesday, “this race could not be closer.”
In this final week of the campaign, the most important thing for the news media to communicate is uncertainty.
“We have a responsibility to not just say what the polls show but explain what they don’t and can’t,” ABC News Washington bureau chief and vice president Rick Klein told CNN. “Any suggestion that the outcome of this election is certain is simply not borne out by the numbers.”
But some partisan media outlets are acting awfully certain. On the right, former President Donald Trump and many of his right-wing media allies are expressing unbridled confidence that the Republican is going to win next week. Fox News stars like Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are already talking on air about how Trump will implement his second-term agenda.
“There is a real danger when media echo chambers falsely and knowingly tell half the country that their candidate is going to win,” conservative political columnist Matt Lewis wrote on Monday. “People wake up to the results the morning after the election, and are incredulous.”
But it happened in 2020 and it might be happening again now. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan recently spent 24 hours soaking up pro-Trump media sources and concluded that “all these outlets are claiming there’s no way Trump can lose if the election is fair.” At the same time, he said, “MAGA media is telling their audience to expect the election to be stolen.”
Conversely, consumers of left-wing media outlets may find it hard to accept that Trump has a real shot at regaining power. While MSNBC hosts are not exuding certainty about a victory for Vice President Kamala Harris, they’re not getting ahead of themselves the way Fox and its counterparts are. Trump is portrayed as so aberrant and dangerous that liberal viewers are left wondering, as former first lady Michelle Obama recently said, “Why is this race even close?”
Answering that question is a key responsibility for reliable news sources. It’s why CNN senior political data reporter Harry Enten is on TV morning, noon and night in the final days of the campaign.
“I spend more hours figuring out ways to say this race is close than New Yorkers spend in traffic,” Enten quipped.
In his Magic Wall live shots, Enten has emphasized the razor-thin margins in swing state polls and explained why anything from a Trump landslide to a Harris landslide is possible, along with lots of very razor-thin outcomes in between.
While yes, “this thing is statistically tied,” ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl said, “it’s also important to point out with a race this close that the battleground states could also break the same way. In other words, once the votes are counted, it’s possible it isn’t so close after all.”
“The most important thing to do is emphasize the uncertainty of the race,” Karl told CNN. “We have lots of data. We have lots of smart people who analyze the data. We present we what have with humility. The truth is nobody knows who is going to win this. And that is a point we have been making over and over again.”
Journalists are typically most comfortable talking about what they do know. But sometimes the story is what isn’t knowable. And this is one of those times.
“I’ve used just about every adjective for ‘close,’ and ‘even,’ but that’s the message every time,” Anthony Salvanto, the CBS News executive director of elections and surveys, told CNN.
Election-related fears and anxieties are especially high this year, but the principle of explaining all the possible outcomes applies to every campaign cycle. “My goal in any election and with every poll is to give understanding of why voters might break one way or the other,” Salvanto said. “Viewers won’t be surprised if they understand why what happens, happens.”
Salvanto played up one other word that’s going to be critical next week: patience. Even after all the polls are closed, there may still be uncertainty about the outcome since different states tabulate votes in different ways.
“It may take time to get results,” he said, “so it’s important to convey that we’re being patient in our coverage.”
