Chris Stirewalt Lays Out How Fox News Worked to Undermine Trump’s Attempt to Claim Victory on Election Night
Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt described in testimony before the Jan. 6 House select committee how the network sought to thwart attempts from then-President Donald Trump to mislead the public about how elections work.
Stirewalt explained that Trump, in claiming the 2020 election was stolen, misunderstood common phenomenon during elections — known as the “red mirage” — in which Republicans appear to win on Election Day thanks to in person voting while Democrats belatedly surge as early and mail-in votes are tallied.
“So in every election, certainly a national election, you expect to see the Republican with a lead but it is not really a lead,” Stirewalt said. “When you put together a jigsaw puzzle it doesn’t matter which piece you put in first — it ends up with the same image.”
Stirewalt, who served on Fox’s elections decision desk before he was fired by the network last year, noted that Trump was the first candidate who tried to exploit that “quirk” in the U.S. election process by falsely claiming it was evidence of foul play.
“We had gone to pains — and I’m proud of the pains we went — to make sure that we were informing viewers that this was going to happen,” Stirewalt said. “Because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear they were going the try to exploit this anomaly.”
He added that the phenomenon was particularly present in the 2020 election, thanks to a surge in voting by mail due to the Covid pandemic.
“So this red mirage, that’s really what you expected to happen on election night?” Committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren asked Stirewalt at the hearing.
“It happens every time,” he replied.
At its second hearing on Monday, the committee aired testimony from series of Trump officials who said they repeatedly explained the “red mirage” concept to Trump — but that those explanations did not stop the president from stating he had won in a speech on election night.
Attorney General Bill Barr told the committee that Trump’s claims of fraud on Election Night were based on changes in the vote counts as ballots were tallied.
“I didn’t think much of that because everyone understood for weeks that that was what was going to happen on Election Night,” Barr said.
Fox News fired Stirewalt, who served on the network’s “decision desk,” several months after the 2020 election. By then, he had been missing from the air for months after defending the network’s early but ultimately accurate call that Biden beat Trump in the key state of Arizona.
The network faced the wrath of Trump over the Arizona call, and many of his supporters ditched Fox for Trumpier alternatives like OANN and Newsmax that more forcefully denied Biden’s win. Fox’s efforts to regain that audience — through moves like firing Stirewalt and adding additional hours of pro-Trump opinion to their lineup — ended up working. The network is back in first place in the ratings after falling behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time in decades.
