‘Pure adrenaline’: Campaign reporters energized by remade 2024 race

Thus, a campaign cycle that has long seemed a bit sleepy is now anything but. And reporters are “chomping at the bit,” as one put it, to cover the expected Trump vs. Harris contest.

“A month ago, there was a sense that this campaign was very static,” NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander said. “I don’t think anybody could feel that way anymore.”

“It’s a whole different universe,” said ABC News chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce. “It’s a whole new ballgame, and now we’re off to the races.”

In some ways, the campaign was historic from the start. Only four other former presidents have run for nonconsecutive terms. And none of these matchups included someone who spent a long swath of the campaign cycle facing criminal prosecution on charges of falsifying business records.

“I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve said ‘unprecedented’ or ‘something we’ve never seen before’ in this election cycle,” ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott said in early June, when things were relatively quiet.

But things have been turbocharged since then. “It has been bonkers,” Scott said this week. “I am running on pure adrenaline and caffeine at this point. It has been a nonstop flood of news for the last 25 days.”

Before a New York jury convicted Trump of all charges on May 30, many of the nation’s top campaign reporters had spent about a month and a half holed up in Lower Manhattan, chronicling the candidate’s courtroom drowsiness and wild after-court statements to the press, rather than on the road with him at county fairs and diner drop-ins.

At the time, the courtroom was the campaign, CBS News correspondent Robert Costa said. “It’s highly unusual as a longtime political reporter to conceptualize your job as almost a legal reporter,” he said in early May.

But things really ramped up after the first debate of the presidential cycle, on June 27.

“Suddenly it’s a really, really interesting election and has tons of things hinging on an outcome,” said Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin. “It has all the elements that any reporter would love to cover.”

Grueskin said he was initially compelled by the media coverage of the Republican candidates challenging Trump, but that faded quickly, when Nikki Haley ended her bid in March.

Some of the old tentpoles of campaign coverage have regained salience in recent weeks. While reporters who spoke with The Post in the spring doubted the significance of this year’s party conventions, that changed when Trump was shot just two days before the Republican National Convention began. Instead of covering a party snoozefest, reporters were on hand to chronicle Trump’s triumphant reemergence.

There also are signs that a Harris-led ticket will be more accessible and hold more of the barnstorming events that have been staples of past campaign coverage, as opposed to the fairly controlled and restrained Biden White House and political operation.

“I certainly am expecting to be out on the road much more than I was expecting a week ago,” said ABC News’s Bruce, who is covering the Harris campaign. With less than four months before the election, “I think the clip and pace of this is going to feel like being shot out of a cannon.”

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy recalled an interview he conducted with Harris in Iowa in the fall of 2019, when she was just one of several candidates chasing the 2020 Democratic nomination. Now that she’s the likely presidential nominee, “she’s invited back anytime!” he said.

If the public’s interest in the race was low at the outset, correspondents said, it was because Americans had already made up their minds about Trump and Biden. Now that dynamic has changed.

“I do think Americans are engaged in a different kind of way,” Bruce said, citing the energy level at a Harris rally she attended in Milwaukee.

“To those of us who are political junkies and love covering campaigns, this is really fun.”