Fox News’s Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin, who called Arizona for President Biden during the 2020 presidential election, will return for the network’s coverage of the 2022 and 2024 elections, according to a new report.
News of Mishkin’s return was reported by the Hollywood Reporter as part of a wide-ranging profile on Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott.
During the 2020 election, President Biden won Arizona by less than a percentage point — the first Democrat to win the state in more than 20 years.
After Fox News’ race call, which came minutes before midnight eastern on election night, members of the Trump campaign reportedly directed operatives to call the network directly and urge them to rescind the call.
The following week, Fox News media correspondent Howard Kurtz reported Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, had called Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to complain about Mishkin’s call of Arizona.
After the Arizona call he made last November, The Trump campaign issued a statement attacking Mishkin as a “[Hillary] Clinton-voting, Biden-donating Democrat.”
Mishkin has donated to members of both the Democratic and Republican parties and in August was awarded a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fox News Media president described the vitriol coming from Trump’s White House after the Arizona call was made.
“Suzanne and I had normal conversations that night. We always have blinders on,” Fox News president Jay Wallace said. “It wasn’t until the next day that we really started to get this amazing heartburn coming in, a lot of it generated by the White House. That was the start of a long week.”
Scott, Wallace said, “could not have been more supportive of the [Arizona] call. And we stuck with it.”
In the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump grew increasingly critical of Fox News’s coverage of his administration, tweeting at one point that top brass at the network had “forgot the Golden Goose.”