“Nobody predicted this,” said Chris Matthews on MSNBC.
“I don’t know one poll that suggested that Donald Trump was going to have this kind of night,” said Jake Tapper on CNN.
“He is still in this,” said Chris Wallace of Fox News a few minutes after 9 p.m., adding, “and I’m not sure a lot of us thought he would be at this hour.”
As Americans watched the presidential race turn on Tuesday from what had been predicted to be a Hillary Clinton victory into a late-night nail-biter, television news anchors seemed as stunned as viewers at home.
“I was wrong: This is a tight race,” said Nicolle Wallace, a Republican strategist and MSNBC analyst. On ABC News, the correspondent Terry Moran spoke of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union and said, “I’ve got a bad sense of déjà vu.” John King, CNN’s slicer and dicer of voting returns, declared, “We’re having a conversation now that was impossible to have two weeks ago.”
By 10 p.m., even as the outcome remained unclear, there were early hints of self-recrimination for the months of political analysis that now, against all expectations, appeared to be falling short.
If Mr. Trump wins, said Megyn Kelly of Fox News, “the pollsters were dead wrong. Their predictions were not worth the paper they were printed on.” She asked her colleagues, “You tell me if the polling industry is effectively done?”
Brian Williams, on MSNBC, offered a meta meditation about the elite world he and his fellow television journalists occupy: the bubble that, he surmised, had hidden a surge in Trump support.
“Margaret Mead journalism,” Mr. Williams said, evoking the famed anthropologist, is “when New York- and Washington-based journalists either accidentally take the wrong turn on GPS and drive into America, drive through America to visit a relative, come back, and report, ‘The place is covered with Trump signs!’ They’re just amazed to find this.”
The air of uncertainty and, in some cases, dumbfoundedness, was a stark contrast to the earlier part of the evening, when the major news networks — some of which had been broadcasting at full-tilt for hours already — seemed prepared for an unusually early night.
Anchors and producers received midafternoon exit polls before voting ended on Tuesday afternoon, and those numbers showed Mrs. Clinton with a small advantage, particularly in key states. On Fox News, even as the anchors made clear the race was far from finished, there was room for some easy banter. “We don’t want to hear anything about this election extending beyond this evening,” joked Ms. Kelly, when a guest raised the specter of a recount.
Within a few hours, gentle humor had fallen away. “It is a white-knuckle kind of night,” Norah O’Donnell said on CBS News. “You’re either opening a second bottle of wine or you’re brewing a new pot of coffee.”
A memorable moment occurred when Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator who had been mostly absent from his channel’s coverage on Tuesday, beamed into the set, tieless, through a camera set up in his Long Island home. At the time, Florida appeared to be trending toward Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. O’Reilly was not having it.
“It’s pretty much a dead heat,” he said, jousting with Charles Krauthammer, a Fox News analyst who said he believed Mrs. Clinton still had the advantage.
The exchange was an intriguing departure from what had been a mostly strait-laced evening on Fox News. While the network remains popular with conservative audiences, its new executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has pledged an emphasis on straight news reporting since he took over from Roger Ailes, the chairman who was forced out this summer.
CNN, by contrast, offered a tornado of a broadcast, with a constant whirl of breathless announcements, a nonstop musical score — drumbeats and synthesizer noises even accompanied the anchors’ analysis — and a seemingly never-ending series of countdown clocks in the corner of the screen.
Wolf Blitzer, the network’s stalwart lead anchor, seemed like he had been downing espressos since morning, speaking so rapidly that Mr. King had to occasionally struggle to get a word in. Midway through the evening, BuzzFeed News published “16 Tweets About How Wolf Blitzer is Driving America Crazy.” (For example: “How does Wolf Blitzer speak for long periods of time without taking a breath?”)
CNN is known for its giant panels of talking heads; at one point, the anchor Anderson Cooper convened a panel that was, he told viewers, “frankly too big to even introduce everybody.” But as the evening went on, the channel narrowed its coverage to the substance that mattered: returns in razor-edge states like Florida and Virginia. Mr. King, with his so-called “magic wall,” won praise for zooming into individual precincts to give viewers a granular sense of the vote count and what districts had yet to be counted.
For network executives, Tuesday night was seen as more-or-less the last bonanza of a year that brought record ratings and advertising revenues, the final turn in a wild presidential campaign with a made-for-television contender, Mr. Trump.
The general expectation, in line with public polling, was that Mr. Trump would be defeated, leaving television news with falling audiences at a time when many viewers are moving to digital competitors and other outlets.
But as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, it appeared likely that political news would not lose its allure to viewers, even if the returns suggested the need for review of network polling standards and practices.
“We probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies,” Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president, conceded during a talk at Harvard last month, a rare admission from a media mogul that saturated television coverage of Mr. Trump, while profitable, may have yielded unexpected repercussions.
Just what those repercussions will be — not only for the television industry, but the political system at large — remained an open question as the evening wore on.
An article on Wednesday about news anchors’ reaction to the unfolding election results misspelled the given name of an MSNBC analyst. She is Nicolle Wallace, not Nicole.
