The final answer may or may not come on Tuesday, but news organizations that have spent months reporting on the presidential campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally have a chance to report on the actual results.

Broadcasters, cable news networks, digital news media sites and one streaming service (Amazon) were set aside Tuesday night to carry the news from their own operations.

The actual results will be a relief to news organizations that had weeks — and an excruciatingly long voting day — to talk about an election campaign that polls have repeatedly shown to be remarkably tight. The first hint of what voters were thinking came shortly after 5 p.m. ET, when the networks reported that exit polls showed voters were unhappy with the way the country was going.

It’s not yet clear whether that dissatisfaction will be attributed to Harris, the current vice president, or former President Trump, who was removed from office in 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash said.

Trying to extract meaning from anecdotal evidence

Otherwise, the networks were left showing images of polling places on Tuesday and trying to extract wisdom from anecdotal evidence.

“Dixville Notch is a metaphor for the entire race,” said CNN’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, straining to draw meaning from the small New Hampshire community that reported its 3-3 vote for Harris and Trump in the early hours of the Tuesday morning.

MSNBC assigned reporter Jacob Soboroff to talk to voters lining up outside a polling place near Temple University in Philadelphia, where actor Paul Rudd was handing out water bottles. A young voter asked Soboroff to take a photo with her and Rudd.

On Fox News Channel, Harris’ replacement, Pete Buttigieg, appeared for a controversial interview with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade.

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

Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams began a one-night appearance on Amazon to deliver results, and he already had an unexpected guest at the California studio where he operated. Puck reporter Tara Palmeri was supposed to report from Trump’s headquarters in West Palm Beach, but the former president’s team denied her credentials to attend.

Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, in revealing the banishment, described her as a “gossip columnist” in a post on the social media site of Trump on who voted 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 return a call for comment.

New York Times strike affects election night meeting

A prominent election night media feature, the Needle on the New York Times website, was endangered by a strike by the newspaper’s technical workers.

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

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

First introduced in 2016, it became a nightmare for supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who the Times determined had an 85% chance of winning the election. Readers watched as the Needle went from forecasting a “likely” Clinton victory at the start of election night, to “turning around” at 10 pm ET, to “leaning toward Trump” at midnight. Trump won the election.

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

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