Is this what it feels like to have some hope? It’s like a timeline shift is happening as we speak. Even Joanne the Scammer is back, which means nature is healing.

In all seriousness, Tuesday’s election results confirmed what I’d felt around me for some time. Remember when I talked about my little Ohio hometown where Glamour T-shirts are randomly selling like hotcakes? Well, another superpower of theirs, besides keeping Glamour in business, is that they flipped to blue after voting three times for Trump.

On my third trip back home this year, I could see the Trump 2028 signs around town slowly disappearing one by one until there were none left. My dad used to work at the Delphi car plant, the biggest employer in the county. When those factory jobs disappeared, people were hoping Trump’s promises to bring them back would pan out. Obviously that didn’t happen, and with a town already depressed by the lack of factory jobs, the rising cost of everyday life was the final straw for my neighbors. 

The residents of my hometown aren’t alone in that. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with some of the women who covered the midterms on Tuesday from different perspectives, both nationally and locally in Georgia, to hear about some of the nuances that got lost in the shuffle of the election chaos that we all might have missed.

Then, in Seen and Heard, Salon abruptly shuts down, Anna Wintour’s former assistant gets candid about her time at Vogue, Dianna Russini’s potential comeback, and more media intel. Plus, as always, we’ve got a fresh batch of media jobs that don’t seem terrible in our Hot Jobs roundup (including a rare, well-paying gig on Apple’s editorial team). 

xoxo,

Stephanie

During the midterms, CBS News went live with its election livestream, ‘The Nerd Show,’ which gave people at home a rare peek under the hood into the engine of a fast-paced newsroom on its busiest night of the year. Political analysts were dutifully crunching numbers and making election calls on camera in real time, while co-hosts Anthony Salvanto (CBS News’ executive director of elections and surveys) and congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns put all these stats in context on the spot. It was a roughly nine-hour data-crunching bonanza that was one of the network’s big pushes to reach digital audiences in places like YouTube and X. All in all, the show brought in 3.3M total views, according to the network.   

Fresh off what were the most consequential midterms we’ve had in recent memory, I caught up with Caitlin about how the show went and what she saw behind the scenes as results rolled in that viewers didn't get to see.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on the first ‘Nerd Show’ livestream. What was it like reporting in that kind of setup?

This is the most fun I’ve ever had covering politics. I think we were on air for almost nine hours, and because we were streaming, it’s different from a studio. We were standing the whole time. I don’t think I sat down at all throughout the night, but I didn’t even realize it until 2 a.m., because we were going, going, going with so much news.

I’ve covered a lot of elections before. I’m on the campaign trail all the time. I’m on the road all the time. I see this stuff up close all the time. This was unlike anything I’ve experienced before in covering politics, just because we expected these final results, but we just didn’t anticipate this huge wave and the amount of participation. That was just so stunning to me.

And I really like how we did this kind of show, because I have a lot of friends and family who don’t follow politics as closely as I do, because they actually have lives, and I get a lot of questions about how election nights go and how you make these calls. It feels like someone’s behind the scenes pulling all these levers. So it was really cool to be like, “Okay, we’re about to make this call. Let’s go over to the people who are actually making the call and show you how they’re doing it.” Even for me, who knows how all this stuff works, it was just a fascinating experience. There were moments, too, that I forgot that I was on air, and I was just watching. It was super fun.

What was the turning point for you during the election, where you could see the mood start to shift?

South Carolina, definitely. Throughout the day, I’d been playing around with different scenarios and different maps. When we called South Carolina early, that was one of the first moments I thought, “Okay, wow. There’s something bigger afoot.” So South Carolina, I think, was the real turning point, because to me it signaled so much about this election: the idea that Republicans were caught flat-footed in a lot of places that they shouldn’t have been, that they had some candidate quality issues, that the president in a Republican state just isn’t enough to carry people through. And we saw that theme carried out through the remaining states.

Since you were crunching these numbers in real time, how were you taking the context you gathered from people out in the field into your analysis? Did you find most of what people were saying matched up with what you were seeing come out?

Absolutely. And I think that’s what’s so important about being out in the field. You have to talk to people. I’m always so struck by the end of these campaigns by how many people just open up to us, and it’s really hard to do. It’s hard to talk to someone that you don’t know. It’s hard to talk to someone on television about how you’re feeling about things. People are really vulnerable, and I always love that about talking to voters.

For example, when we were watching Kansas specifically: I was in Kansas a couple of weeks ago, and I spent time with a cattle rancher who voted for Trump three times and would likely support him again, but he was open to the Democrat this time around because the president’s tariff policies were directly affecting him and his livelihood. That, to me, set off this moment of, “Okay, this isn’t something that we’re just seeing in polling, or something consultants are projecting.” This was a real person telling me this. And then, we saw that reflected in the vote, because the Democrat who won that Senate seat got support from Republicans. That kind of stuff really helped inform our coverage of election night, because it’s not only, “Hey, this is what we are seeing directly in the numbers,” and numbers never lie, but the context is everything that we’ve discovered out in the field. So I try to blend those two together.

One interesting stat that I noticed from CBS’s exit polls was about how people feel a little disenchanted by both parties. The majority of people are not necessarily all one way or the other, and it makes me wonder: Is this election a blip of solidarity when it comes to supporting Democrats, or do you think this is more than a one-off thing? Are we going to see this play out as we get into 2028, 2029?

I kept going back to that poll throughout the night, because voters were saying that they essentially don’t like either party, and that they don’t feel like either party is doing anything for them. The difference in this midterm is that Republicans are the ones in charge of both chambers and the White House, and that’s what typically happens. You take your anger out at the party in power, because those are the people really running the show.

But I do think it’s important, and Democrats have said this to me too, that Democrats should not take away from this election that people were turning out in droves for their policies. They were turning out in droves and voting the way they did (and this is also reflected in our exit polling) because they were opposed to Trump’s policies and wanted to send a message. So Democrats do have a lot of work to do in terms of delivering on a lot of the stuff they talked about. They have a broad coalition now, and a broad spectrum of people who are going to be serving in Congress, with a lot of different ideas about what the party should be and how to move forward, so governing in that kind of environment can be really tricky. But they also have much bigger numbers than they had anticipated.

That’s what I kept going back to during the night, and that’s why we see these swings so often. Voters are mad at the people in power. Two years ago, Democrats. Now it’s Republicans. They are not afraid to send a message.

How do you balance the heat of the moment, where you’re getting all these numbers, but you also don’t want to jump the gun on saying anything that you might have to roll back? How do you keep your sanity during that?

It’s this constant challenge of: You want to be first, but you never want to be wrong. We talked a lot about this in the beginning. We want to be as transparent as possible and show people, “Hey, this is what it’s looking like, but we have not called it because of this outstanding data.” That’s what was really cool about the show: We were able to show people, “This is the outstanding data. This is what we’re waiting for before making that call.”

There was a point in Texas where we did it in real time. The data was coming in, we had switched it to lean Democratic, then likely Democratic, and then they went to us live, and we were able to make the call on air in real time, as they had come to the conclusion from the data. I think that helps give transparency to the process. There’s understandably a lot of distrust in the media and a lot of distrust in the process, and we’re just trying to show people how it happens and what happened. So that is always the north star: to be right.

Was it nerve-racking for you to have all these different people everywhere filming your every move?

It was wild, because there were actually moments that I forgot I was on television, because we were just so in the moment. Like you saw, we were reacting to data in real time, and we had cameras on us all the time. There were points where I literally gasped and thought, “Oh my god, I can’t believe what I’m seeing right now.” And I think that’s something that we wouldn’t necessarily do in a more formal type of piece. We also had more time to be ourselves, and I think that’s really important now more than ever. People just want to feel like they can relate to you and go through this with you.

A lot of friends and family I know, who’ve always been political junkies, had multiple tabs open, multiple screens: the TV, computer, phone kind of situation. So going into the night, I was really thinking, “I want you to be here with me while I process this too, and see what it really looks like.” I’m so used to television now that a lot of times I don’t think about it. But I think this was the advantage of this kind of situation: “Hey, you’re going to be on for eight hours straight. Just know that going in, and go with it.”

There were so many firsts and historic moments that came out of this election. What was a significant result that maybe got overlooked because so many things happened in the chaos?

It’s such a great question, because there were moments in the night where I was pulling up graphics to walk through and unpack some of this stuff, and then we had to move on so quickly because more results were coming in. We’re still digesting it today. But a couple of things that I think should not be lost on people: We had a high number of women elected governor across the country, a high number of women elected to Congress, and a historic number of Black governors. That is a huge story in this election, across different states in the Midwest and in the South. I think that’s huge and should not be understated at all.

We’re also going to have the first Black speaker of the House of Representatives. I know that going into this, everybody understood that Democrats were likely to take the House, but still, it shouldn’t be lost on people that Hakeem Jeffries is likely to be the first African American Speaker of the House of Representatives. That is a huge, huge deal, and with a much bigger majority than anybody had anticipated, so that makes the job of governing a little bit easier. The diversity of candidates: A lot of them made history. The first Muslim elected to the Senate, as well, in Abdul El-Sayed. Michigan was called right after we went off air. A lot of those headlines we’re still processing, and they’re headlines in their own right.

My final question for you, Caitlin: You mentioned that Democrats still have some work cut out for them as far as building trust with voters heading into the next presidential election. In your experience speaking to people out in the field about what Congress and politicians can do to win that trust back, what do you think needs to happen on their side to regain it?

I think the mistake that politicians have continued to make is they speak to voters and don’t always listen to them. They hear from them, but they don’t always listen to them. It was very clear, from the messages being sent before this election wrapped up, what voters were concerned about, and it also was very clear that people in Washington were not quite hearing them. So I think that’s the big takeaway here. I keep saying this, but politics is not complicated. People tell you how they feel, and they vote accordingly. Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or somewhere in between, it’s the same thing over and over. Voters are saying, “What are you doing to help me?” And if they feel like you’re not, they’re going to vote that way.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

Salon abruptly shutters. Coming completely out of left field this afternoon, Salon suddenly announced that it’s ceasing operations immediately after 31 years. The goodbye memo on the website reads: “The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years. After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable.” It’s a rather brief and anticlimactic farewell note for a site that’s been around for three decades. Erin Keane, Salon’s former chief content officer, mentioned that staff found out about the news just this morning — they were blindsided. 

Anna Wintour’s ex-assistant goes on the record. Besides a caprese salad without the actual salad part, America’s fashion dame also ran on coffee milkshakes from Burger Heaven. That’s one of the remarkable details to come from Wintour’s ex-assistant Jill Demling during her chat with Back Row’s Amy Odell. While Jill was Wintour’s assistant for just over a year starting in 1998, she had the milkshake ready every day like clockwork at 4 p.m. That whole arrangement changed once Condé Nast moved from 350 Madison Avenue to 4 Times Square. In a Burger Heaven desert, Anna was forced to switch to Starbucks Frappuccinos, Jill says. The horror. 

Jill eventually moved up the ranks to book covers for Vogue, and revealed that Beyoncé’s first cover happened by accident. Apparently Katherine Heigl had to drop out and Beyoncé was a backup, if you can believe that (granted, this was in 2009, which was also the last time I thought about Katherine Heigl). Anyway, Jill and Amy’s chat was a fun little fly-on-the-wall convo that I enjoyed listening to. 

Speaking of Anna, the Met announced the theme for 2027. Please, don’t brace yourself. 

“extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday” will look at how designers take everyday clothes like jeans and T-shirts and turn them into high fashion. That’s the scraps we got after Anna Wintour’s grand plans to honor John Galliano were canned due to the designer’s past antisemitic statements. It’s for the best that the Galliano exhibit got canceled, but the theme is a real snoozer of a concept.

Have a tip for me? Send it to stephanie@la-fronde.com or my Signal if you want to keep things confidential (itsstephwill.94).

Dianna’s dilemma. A few weeks back, I covered the possibility of Dianna Russini returning to sports reporting after her scandal with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel earlier this year. The rumors have now started up again: she’s reportedly told close confidants that she’s set to return as soon as next week, though there’s no confirmation on where and exactly when. Page Six reported in September that she planned to address the scandal once she’s at her new job. Unfortunately for her, I don’t think there’s really anything left to say that wouldn’t just put her in the line of fire again. Especially after all the fallout from The New York Times’ exposé.