An Armchair Pundit's Guide to Election Night on TV

Even if McCain holds his strongholds plus Virginia, Florida and Ohio -- but loses Iowa, where Obama is ahead -- he would be 10 electoral votes short of victory. McCain would have to win two of these three Western states: Nevada (five electoral votes), New Mexico (five) and Colorado (nine). Polls close in Colorado and New Mexico at 9 p.m. Eastern time and in Nevada an hour later. If the race isn't settled by 10, when Iowa voting also ends, viewers might want to haul out more snacks.

The 11 p.m. states -- California, Oregon, Washington -- are all solid bets to be bathed in blue. So if the country is up late, the election will probably revolve around the three Mountain West battlegrounds that went for Bush last time.

Exhaustion alert: If, in this scenario, Obama takes Nevada and New Mexico and McCain carries Colorado, the candidates could wind up in a 269 to 269 tie.

At ABC, as at other networks, Senior Vice President Jeffrey Schneider said, projections will be based on actual votes, exit polls, historical data and telephone surveys of absentee voters.

"We're going to take it slow," he said. "Our only desire is to be right, not to be first."

No one has forgotten the debacle of 2000, when the networks called Florida for Gore, pulled it back and then called it for Bush -- led by Fox News, which declared him the president-elect at 2:16 a.m. -- before the muddle that triggered a 36-day recount melodrama.

On Election Day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry piling up sizable margins in unexpected places. The surveys were way off. Fox gave Ohio to Bush at 12:41 a.m., bringing him to 269, but when voters woke up the next morning, the networks still hadn't called the race because two other states were deemed too close.

"We couldn't understand how we could be winning so big in so many places," Devine said, recalling the inaccurate exit surveys. "It was stunning, actually." Tonight, he says, "if everyone starts saying these races are too close to call, that feeling in the pit of your stomach will come back."

The widespread media assumption, based on electoral projections over the past two weeks, is that Obama is a substantial favorite tonight. If that turns out to be wrong, journalists will have an enormous amount of explaining to do. If it turns out to be right, the anchors will be announcing the election of the first black president.

"The challenge for the networks on election night is, how do you capture the historic nature of it without going gaga and fawning?" said Cook, who expects Obama to win. "If you go too far in one direction, you risk playing into every negative stereotype about the media."