asap gets some insight on how election night unfolded across the land through audio interviews with the AP's JERRY SCHWARTZ, who kept an eye on key races.
Covering election night is a gargantuan task for The Associated Press, with countless reporters and editors from all over the world's largest newsgathering organization asked to do their part.
At the center of the action was Jerry Schwartz, the editor in charge of the AP's NewsFeatures department. His role, well into the early hours of Wednesday: to oversee the "50-state glance," a regularly updated set of brief capsules on big races across the country.
That gave him a unique feel for the nation's electoral pulse. And every hour or so on election night, Schwartz took a few moments to offer asap's JAIME HOLGUIN some insight on what was happening where. The attached audio clips show, in Schwartz's own words, how the night unfolded.
Some races were decided when the polls closed. Other results took longer to come together.
"There's a good chance that a lot of these races, even at the end of the night, will be in question," Schwartz said early Tuesday evening. It looks like he was right. As of 2 a.m. EST on Wednesday, two Senate races -- and the balance of power in the chamber -- remained up for grabs.
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EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
For Schwartz, who's been supervising state-by-state election roundups since 1990, things started picking up around 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when a lot of results began rolling in. That was the beginning of a long night.
If there's one thing Schwartz has learned in all his election nights, it's that they're never easy and they always have many pieces to them -- kind of "like a huge interlocking puzzle."
"We have seen nights that have been just extraordinarily complex and difficult," he says. "In 2000, for example, we watched as at one point it seemed we had a president and then it turned out we did not.
"You just never know what to expect."
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Jaime Holguin is an asap reporter based in New York.
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