He helped set up Fox News' Decision Desk. Now NewsNation is hoping it will break out on Election Day

Four years ago, Chris Stirewalt was at the center of a political firestorm.

As a member of the Fox News Decision Team, he spent Election Night 2020 alongside other data nerds deciding when states might be called for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

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It was Fox's call for Arizona, made much earlier than his rivals', that rocked the election campaign and became a major news story in its own right, with repercussions felt across the political and media landscape.

For 2024, Stirewalt won't be huddled in a back room. He will take center stage as an on-air analyst for NewsNation, the emerging cable news channel owned by local television giant Nexstar.

This time he wants to bring viewers into the room and try to understand the way television networks have called elections over the last 75 years.

“There was a kind Wizard of Oz Component that in another room, in another place, there were magical beings who did this work of predicting the outcome of a presidential election,” says Stirewalt The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think that works in our fragmented and atomized media world, where there are no longer any giants ruling the earth. I think you have to show people what you’re doing and I think you have to be transparent about what’s going on.”

That's why Stirewalt and NewsNation want to pull back the curtain and, unlike the other broadcasters, completely forego their own forecasts. Instead, NewsNation will turn its calls over to Decision Desk HQ. They will be completely independent of NewsNation, but the network will have cameras in its office at Georgetown Law School so viewers and anchors (including Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas and Leland Vittert) can see what they are doing.

Stirewalt assumes that this is a constellation that will represent a clear contrast to other television networks with their own in-house teams.

“It was a bit of a challenge for me personally because I like being involved, right? That's what I love. I have been voting in elections since 2010 and this will be the first election since then that I have not participated in, helped on the call and participated in,” he says. “But I think this is better. I think it's better because if you want to make sure that commercial, mercenary or partisan sentiments don't influence how races are declared, it helps if you keep it clean and separate. They're over there. They do their thing. We can talk to them. We can watch them. We can ask them questions, we can do all that, but they're going to do what they're going to do and we're going to report on it and we're going to try to provide context and explanations.”

There's actually a precedent for what could go wrong, and Stirewalt has seen it firsthand. As is now well documented, members of President Trump's inner circle attempted to pressure Fox to change its call in Arizona. Ultimately, of course, Fox did not withdraw its call for Arizona, and Biden won the state.

But in a competitive television news landscape, NewsNation's political editor is also betting that his style of election coverage will resonate, a difficult hurdle given the partisanship that dominates cable news.

“Personality drives a lot of TV news, reasoning, spin and attempts to beat the spin drive much of what we see on TV.” But this is the week when the nerds rule and when nothing can be spun anymore,” Stirewalt says. “When the polls close and everything is out of the count, then people’s opinions no longer matter as much. We are no longer capable of persuasion and motivation, and now we must try to tell people what happened, accurately and as quickly as possible.

“I think America wants to know, and I think what we can do is meet them where they are and instead of continuing to try to twist them or put talking heads on them to reassure them, we can say what’s going on,” he said, adding.

And it could end up being a defining moment for NewsNation, too. In 2024, the station will be a 24-hour news station for the first time (the station rebranded from WGN America in 2021), and in a time of media turmoil, Stirewalt seems to believe there is an audience that wants what NewsNation is selling.

“I don’t know how big the audience is in America that wants fair news and doesn’t like to be coddled and flattered and lied to, but it’s not zero,” he says.

“I think if we can be transparent and independent, then we have done a lot of good for ourselves and hopefully for the country,” he adds. “Election coverage is an opportunity for NewsNation to deliver on the promise and idea that there is a significantly underserved market of Americans who would like to remove their news from partisan silos. And if there's ever a time when people want that, it should be an election in which ordinary people don't have to be comforted or deceived when it comes time to count the votes. What they should want, or what I hope they want, is to be treated like adults, and I think we can do that.”

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