Election Night Tease

After months of telling viewers that one candidate is a full lap ahead in the presidential race, television news is now faced with the daunting task of trying to make people care about what happens at the finish line.

The lures for Tuesday’s election night audience include sci-fi special effects (CBS is boasting that its whiz-bangery is 10 times more powerful than those in “Jurassic Park”), speed-of-light data and nonstop political banter.

“We’re promoting the hell out of our programming. We’ll use the best political team in the business--and then there are the nude dancers that come on at 8:15,” says Jeff Gralnick, vice president and executive producer of ABC News.

With many of the nation’s citizens apparently yawning over the primaries, tuning out the conventions and even skipping the debates, television’s political experts fear that even the best technology and brightest political team won’t stop a large segment of the public from going elsewhere for its evening entertainment. These viewers are turned off by politics, and they might not even vote.

For those trying to talk about politics, this is not good news. Or as Gralnick lamented last week: “If they don’t vote, we know they’re not going to watch us.”

Officials at CBS News hope they will attract more viewers--especially younger ones--with a system that gives instant access to data that they said usually is not available until the day after the election.

The instant data goes first to anchor Dan Rather, who can manipulate what’s on the air by pushing a button marked “Texas,” for example, when he wants the data and background on the races in his home state. Then the same data should be available on the Internet a few nanoseconds later. The idea is to bring the drama of election night to a new generation and a new medium.

“Perhaps the single most disappointing fact about this election is not the gender gap but the age gap,” says Steve Jacobs, executive producer for CBS News special events. “Under 30, only one in four is paying attention to this election, and candidly, the reasons why CBS News has been aggressively marketing--and there is no better term for it--marketing virtual reality and the presence on the Internet is an attempt to reach viewers and voters that we don’t reach. We’ve never marketed like this in the past.”

For many politicians and some political analysts, a big reason for this disconnection on election night comes when the networks declare a winner in the presidential race, thus giving viewers a chance to slip away to the many channels offering what one network official called “election relief.”

Most insiders predict that the networks will call this race by a few seconds after 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when polls close in states with more than 400 electoral votes (270 are needed to win the presidency).

The frenzy of announcements about who won the White House started at 10:42 p.m. EST on election night 1992, even earlier in 1988, when President George Bush trampled Democrat Mike Dukakis--a landslide that the networks began predicting at 9:17 p.m. EST.

The possibility that this year it could be even earlier has particularly upset Republicans and Westerners who worry that people will not bother to vote in crucial congressional and state races if they think the presidency has already been decided.

“A race to be the first to declare a winner in the presidential election, before millions of Americans have a chance to vote, would be an irresponsible and damaging course,” Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour wrote to ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC last week.

Even though all the big television news operations (and the Associated Press) pay jointly for a service that analyzes the data and makes projections, these forecasts from the Voter News Service are almost always later than the networks.

The reason is that for the past several elections, network news operations have employed their own statisticians and data analysts to study the same results of exit polls and then beat the competition in calling races.

As the networks project which presidential candidate wins each state, the electoral vote will automatically begin to add up so that viewers can see easily when one candidate reaches the magic 270 that are needed to elect a president.

“When that happens, we will, of course, project a winner,” says Bill Wheatley, NBC News vice president.

While the race to be first to name the next president may be most intense among the bigger and older networks, Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling cable news operation has no plans to enter the election-calling contest, says Emily Rooney, director of political coverage for Fox News Channel.

“We’re not interested in calling it first,” says Rooney, who notes that the news network will be less than a month old on election day. “We’re more interested in the stories.”

If the presidential race is over by 9 p.m. EST, what will happen over the next four or five hours that the major networks had planned to be focusing on it?

“Clearly, Congress is the story,” says NBC’s mega-pundit Tim Russert. Will Newt Gingrich hold onto his perch as speaker of the House, Russert asks. Will conservative Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah or liberal Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee? What kind of Congress will President Clinton face in his second term if he is reelected?

“Those are some of the questions we’ll be asking, and it’s possible we won’t know the answers until 2 in the morning, or even until December,” Russert says. The December possibility looms if the question of which party has the most elected officials in Congress is so close that the outcome depends on 13 districts in Texas, where court-ordered changes in district lines have delayed the general election until December.

Others in the news media believe that any election, even this one, offers its own set of surprises.

“I have a feeling that this is going to be a strange election . . . ,” says Tom Hannon, CNN’s political director. “People’s allegiances have loosened over the years, and the vote is much more volatile than 20 years ago.

“Maybe people will tune in to see that,” he said with hope. “Then again, maybe they’ll just tune in to see that it’s over.”

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* WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY: For the smaller networks, election night is a chance to attract new viewers. F10