NewsNation has a different kind of recipe for Election Night — heavy on stats, light on the gas. When the Nexstar cable-news outlet launches five hours of coverage of the nation’s 2026 midterm elections on November 3, it will do so with the intent of keeping viewers interested in key results and on-the-ground reporting, giving them so much of it they won’t be craving the usual analysis and roundtable chatter. The network is, as it has during recent coverage of elections, relying on Decision Desk HQ, a tabulator of voting data that enjoys a good record as an early caller of key races.
That company’s data-miners will hold forth in a “war room” at Georgetown University and will offer behind-the-scenes looks at how the team analyzes incoming stats and makes its pronouncements. We live in an era of prediction markets. People have an expectation of what they are going to get and when they are going to get it.
We can do that.” NewsNation will vie for attention Tuesday night with a growing host of media outlets that will also be covering elections. Some are bigger rivals like CNN or NBC News. Others are nimble start-ups led by digital “creators,” some of whom once worked in traditional media.
Either way, says Stirewalt, NewsNation thinks it has an edge. Decision Desk HQ proved to be a pivotal ally. The company’s data helped NewsNation become the first network to call Donald Trump the winner of the presidential election in 2024.
I can’t promise you we are going to be first calling the Senate majority. I think we are going to be right before we are going to be first,” says Stirewalt. CBS’ stations have played an instrumental role in a format that takes viewers to news events taking place in different parts of the country that are covered by CBS’ local newsrooms.
Election Night can also be a good time to promote other parts of a network. The network’s regular evening hosts, Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas, Leland Vittert and Katie Pavlich, will co-anchor the evening’s proceedings from Washington, D.C, with Stirewalt and Connell McShane in New York ready to pore through data and stats. NewsNation can tap into resources from dozens of Nexstar stations around the country, and will have its own correspondents spread out around the nation.
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