For days, if not weeks, our media pundits have been telling us not to expect a winner on election night. The left demanded patience and voiced their concerns that Trump would prematurely declare victory and turn to the courts for support.
Yet when election night came, those calls for patience went out the window. Instead, Democrats melted down on television and social media, treating every Trump red-state victory as a sign of certain defeat. It may not have been their fault.
While the major cable networks were still doing set up and exposition, the New York Times already appeared determined to induce full-on post-traumatic stress disorder. As early as 7:30 p.m., the newspaper’s online election coverage had all the subtlety of an instrument-only airplane landing: three needles — just like the one they used to condemn Hillary Clinton’s chances four years ago — all pointing to the right. The most important of them was already pinned, indicating a 92% probability of a Trump victory in Florida. It was the sense memory equivalent of a “brace for impact” warning.
MSNBC, which had been in an electoral frenzy for the past six months, put its interactive map wizard Steve Kornacki into high gear. Prepared for extended combat, with not one but two radio transmitters in the back pockets of his trademark khakis, a manic Kornacki orchestrated an almost sarcastically advanced set of displays. Screens opened within screens at breakneck speed, inducing viewer vertigo as he zoomed into evermore granular counties and back again to national scale. It was a war room, with alerts that only Kornacki could decode in real time: “Uh-oh, here we go… Harris County is in… ” The enemy troops are on the horizon. Rhythmic music reminiscent of the stormtrooper theme played as yellow placards in forced perspective worthy of a Star Wars title sequence announced the latest news. Most usually, it was “too early to call.” All that for nothing. But the colors were flying, the numbers were flashing, the voices were threatening, and our cortisol levels were kept at max for another sequence.
The further from liberal media, the less frantic things were. CNN, while rooting for Biden, tried to maintain some decorum. Only one newscaster at a time was allowed to panic. Unlike the shirt-sleeved Kornacki, CNN’s John King kept his shiny black suit buttoned at all times as he manned the network’s classier hi-def touch screen. Fewer gizmos, but clearer graphics. For sense makers. Whenever he’d get a bit too desperate about finding a reasonable Biden path to victory, Jake Tapper would interrupt from the news desk: “Well, we just don’t know what’s going on yet, John.”
“That’s right,” King would agree, as if being talked down off a bad acid trip. “This is all there is. There have been no real surprises.”
Whenever a state was actually called for Biden in those early evening hours otherwise dominated by red, King was sure to repeat it again and again. “There he is. A win in New Mexico. Biden wins New Mexico. New Mexico is Biden.” As if repeating it four times demonstrated equal coverage after Trump won the four preceding states.
In comparison to enduring the left and moderate media, flipping over to Fox News was like going on a yoga retreat. As the night began, the network had its own probability meter with Joe Biden at 56% probability to win. But nobody was in a panic. The anchors seemed more confused about the fact that polling showed 75% of Americans wanted a mask mandate.
Everything on Fox was slow and deliberate. Chris Wallace joked about not being able to work his iPad as the network’s board operator Bill Hemmer calmly zoomed in on various states. “It takes time to figure out where votes come from,” he explained in homespun zen. He treated the numbers themselves as if they were too raw for audience consumption. “Not a ton of data here,” he explained, “but we can start pokin’ around.”
Somehow, Fox had the healthiest perspective on the early polls: wait and see. Everything was explained slowly, with mostly monosyllabic words, and in the context of easy-to-follow stories. It was all reassuring. Even the gaffes. When Hemmer clicked on South Carolina, nothing came up but a blank white outline of the state. He smiled at the camera. “Hey, it’s early!” he laughed. He explained to his viewers what the frantic left was incapable of even considering: Early data can be misleading. “It could feel diabolical,” he warned. “So we’ll be patient with this.”
If only the left could learn to exercise such patience. Yes, the stakes are high. Yes, we’re all traumatized from the 2016 election and the Trump presidency. We are afraid for our health, our climate, our economy, and our people of color. We know the parades of white men’s pickup trucks driving through our towns honking their horns and waving Trump flags are less an invitation to celebrate an authoritarian leader than an angry rebuke of our values, our literacy, and our evidence-based view of reality.
But damn it, our left-center media seems determined to assault our psyches in every way possible. It’s not a particularly inviting comportment for attracting new voters: Come worry with us! I spent the majority of my evening on Fox, just because it was a less stressful way to get through the night. My friends who stayed on MSNBC till dawn are an absolute mess.
More important, by trashing their nervous systems, they’ve rendered themselves much less ready to face the challenges ahead. We all knew this election was unlikely to be decided in one night, save an unexpected and unlikely Biden landslide. The governors of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania went so far as to go on TV and tell their constituencies not to expect immediate results. This is a long game. We owe it to ourselves, and to the sanctity of our elections, to be fully present to bear witness to this process. Let’s treat ourselves with care, whatever happens.