After months of preparation, news outlets were finally able to report the election results.

The final answer may or may not come Tuesday, but news organizations that have been covering the presidential campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for months finally have a chance to report the real results.

Broadcast networks, cable news networks, digital news sites and one streaming service, Amazon, all set aside Tuesday nights to spread news about their own operations.

The actual results will be a relief to news organizations that have had weeks (and an agonizingly long Election Day) to report on an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be surprisingly tight. The first hint of what voters were thinking came shortly after 5:00 pm ET, when networks reported that exit polls showed voters were dissatisfied with the way the country was progressing.

It’s still not clear who will blame Harris, the current vice president, or former President Trump, who was ousted from office in 2020, for the discontent, CNN’s Dana Bash said.

Trying to extract meaning from anecdotal evidence

Otherwise, TV networks would have had to show photos of polling stations on Tuesday and try to glean wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” said CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, as she struggles to extract meaning from the tiny New Hampshire community, which reported a 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump early Tuesday morning.

MSNBC assigned reporter Jacob Soboroff to talk to voters waiting in line outside a polling place near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. One young voter asked Soboroff to pose for a photo with her and Rudd.

On Fox News, Harris’ surrogate son Pete Buttigieg gave a controversial interview to “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.

“Is this an interview or a debate?” Buttigieg said at one point. “Can I at least finish my sentence?”

Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams launched a one-day gig at Amazon to get results, and he already had one surprise guest at the California studio where he worked. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was scheduled to report from Trump’s West Palm Beach headquarters, but the former president’s team denied her credentials to participate.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, speaking about the ouster, described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social networking site X. Palmeri told Williams she accurately reported some concern in the Trump camp about who is voting early.

Amazon said Palmeri was replaced at Trump’s Florida headquarters by New York Post reporter Lydia Moynihan.

Neither Axios nor Politico immediately confirmed reports that some of their reporters were similarly banned, and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a call for comment.

New York Times strike impacts election night

One of the election night media outlets of note, The Needle on the New York Times website, was under threat due to a strike by the newspaper’s technicians.

The newspaper said early Tuesday that it was unclear whether it would be able to include the feature on its website during election night coverage because it relies on computer systems maintained by company engineers, including those who went on strike early Monday morning .

The Needle, as its name suggests, is a graph that uses voting results and other calculations to indicate the likelihood of a presidential candidate winning.

First introduced in 2016, it became a nightmare for supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who the Times said had an 85 percent chance of winning the election. Readers watched as The Needle went from forecasting a “likely” Clinton win early in election night to a “toss-up” by 10 pm ET to a “Trump lean” at midnight. Trump won the election.

The Times said that “we will only publish a live version of the Needle if we are confident” that the computer systems it relies on for data are stable.

About 650 members of the Times Technical Guild went on strike early Monday morning.