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Brit Hume, the Washington, D.C., managing editor of Fox News, will lead tonight's election coverage on the news station of choice for most of the White House. Hume's "fair and balanced" coverage begins at 6 p.m. Eastern and continues until at least midnight. Fox News Channel plays constantly aboard Vice President Dick Cheney's plane, and it was Fox coverage that was flickering on a corner television in the White House residence when reporters were taken upstairs on election night in 2004. Hume, a University of Virginia graduate, was with ABC News for 23 years and was that network's White House correspondent from 1989 through 1996, when he joined the fledgling Fox. On Monday morning, he chatted with TIME's White House correspondent about how he thinks Election Night will go.

TIME: Given the political landscape, what do you think this Election Night will be like for viewers?

HUME: At first, it'll be suspenseful, assuming you have a rooting interest in one party or the other. First of all, until we know the outcome in the House, which is the one where we're more likely to see a change, there'll be a lot of suspense about that. Once we know, and of course we can't tell how late it'll be before we know, then of course you have the second issue, which is the Senate, which we may know early or late. Beyond that, it becomes a discussion of what it all means, in some sense. It will be of interest, I think, to viewers to say: OK, we know this is which party is going to be in control, what difference is it going to make? And so on. So it seems that it'll be suspenseful and then after that, just a matter of normal curiosity about what the meaning of the results is.

TIME: What's your sense of how soon we'll know control of the Senate, and how soon we'll know control of the House?

HUME: We've looked at this over and over again. We will probably have a pretty clear indication early from polling. Even at 7 o'clock, when the polls close in Indiana and Kentucky, for example, there are a number of endangered seats in those two states, so we might get an early read from that about which way the night is going to go. It's not clear that there will a nationwide trend. But there's a good chance there will. And if there is, in one clear direction or another, we may see it in those two states. And we could know very early. We won't be able to say with finality that it's done until a certain number of races have been tabulated. Of course when you're talking about House races, you can't do all that much from exit polls. You can do something, but not all that much. So you're going to need some kind of indications from the raw vote itself.

TIME: If it's a big Democratic night, what's your top line about why? If Republicans surprise and hold on, what's your top line about that?

HUME: If it's a big Democratic night, the obvious indication that we have it that it's all about the war. We will obviously scan the exit polling to see if there are other factors in the race that we don't immediately see, as sometimes there turn out to be, and that will be an interesting element of the whole evening. If the Republicans succeed in holding this back — either in one house or, less probably, in both, which is still possible — then it'll be a very interesting night of soul-searching about how this could possibly have happened in a year so clearly unfavorable to the Republicans and with the war front and center and highly unpopular.

TIME: In the end, is the Congressman Mark Foley sex scandal less of a factor than it might have looked like?

HUME: I think Foley's one of those episodes where the damage from that is done. In other words, you're not going to see people going into the voting booth and saying: I'm going to vote Democrat because of the disgusting things that Mark Foley said to a page. But campaigns are kind of organic. They have a certain growth and a certain progression about them. Scandals tend not to be voting issues, but they tend to be major interruptions, and they tend to cause all kinds of tactical and even strategic problems. Because what happens to a party or an individual candidate who is caught up in one of these things in the middle of a campaign is that whatever they're trying to get out — whatever message they're trying to send, what events they're trying to do, whatever it is that they're trying to call attention to — is completely obliterated by days of negative publicity, or even longer, about a particular scandal. In this case, it was the Foley scandal, which clearly interrupted some Republican momentum which had built during the month of September.

TIME: Is there something different you're doing with exit polls this year?

HUME: We were very worried about the exit polling because it's been so dodgy in the last several outings. So we're going to look at it with very great care. The problem, of course, is that the first cut we're going to see is about 5 p.m. Exit polling is better when you've got a 12,000-person national sample. It'll be much more helpful in the Senate races than it will be in the House races. We'll be watching to see whether the kind of oversampling that we got in 2004 — in the early going, it was with women, and then with Democrats overall — happens again, which it well could. TIME: What's Fox's record with exit polls and projections?

HUME: We've had a pretty good record with projections. Of course, we had the famous controversial 2 o'clock in the morning call for Bush in Florida in 2000, which turned out at long last to be correct. But we certainly had no idea when we made that call what was about to occur.

TIME: How has technology changed election night for the networks?

HUME: One thing it has done unmistakably: We used to be able to get a pretty generous look at exit polling early on. But you can't do that anymore because it immediately lights up the Internet. The other thing technology has changed is that we're seeing the aches and pains in some quarters with the voting machines, although my own personal take on that story is that it is wildly overblown. If you've ever voted on an electronic machine, you've got to be seriously dopey not to be able to manage that, for a nation that relies as much as we do on ATMs. People will say to you: You get a receipt when you go to an ATM. But if you ever go to an ATM, what do you see all over the floor? Discarded receipts. Nobody ever pays any attention to them. You wait for your statement to come in. And we don't have a national problem with ATMs. So it's difficult for me to understand why these much-less-complex transactions such as voting machines could really be a serious problem. But I don't know how you'd ever examine that in the context of what it used to be like with paper ballots, when the problems may have been less visible. But that's just a personal take on that. The advent of the blogs has had an effect and the blogs from time to time will affect the national perception of an issue in a very indirect way. When some smart blogger seizes onto some key point or notices something and gets something started, it eventually catches on in the mainstream media and then it's all over the place.

TIME: How many Election Nights do you figure you've done, print and broadcast?

HUME: I really didn't have to cover Election Night when I was a print reporter. I've done every one since '74. I was a consultant to ABC News at the time. I was kind of out on my own, working for ABC's documentary unit. From '76 forward, I was a reporter on every Election Night. In '78 and '80, I was doing the House races from the Hill. I did the Senate all through the '80s until I was at the White House. I was at the White House into the mid-'90s, and then I've been the anchor of Election Night at Fox ever since I got here.

TIME: Does Election Night get old hat, and do you have any Election Day or Election Night traditions or superstitions?

HUME: I don't have any superstitions. It CAN get old, and it's a very great danger, because the magic ingredient in journalism is enthusiasm. Reporters who are enthusiastic and passionately interested in the stories that they're doing do better work. If you've lost interest, you're going to fail, no matter how much you know or how interesting you might be on other things. It's a struggle to maintain your interest level. Sometimes the outcome of an election is foretold, as it was for me when I was covering the Bush White House in '92. I could see that thing coming. There was no doubt about it. It was just a matter of standing there and watching the loser lose. It was a little boring.

TIME: Do you feel you have a pretty good sense of what's going to happen Election Night?

HUME: Yeah, but I'm less sure of it than I was 24 or 36 hours ago. The late polling has indicated what I consider to be an unexpected trend toward the Republicans. Surprising numbers on a certain number of internals: One showed the Republicans had pulled even with the Democrats on the handling of Iraq, which is an astonishing number. It may not be right, but it does suggest a trend in that direction. If that's true, it could be make a big difference. Of course, the wild card in the deck is this whole issue of how big a lead you can surmount with an exceptional turnout operation. Nobody really knows the answer to that. My inclination is that it has to be really close for that to be decisive. And it's beginning to look like it's closer. Could it get close enough by tomorrow morning? Who knows?

TIME: Thank you for making time for us.

HUME: You bet.

• MIKE ALLEN/WASHINGTON
• The managing editor of the network most likely to be watched by White House staffers gives his predictions