What I Learned From My Night Watching Election TV

Steve Kornacki and I have to stop meeting like this.

A TV crush is supposed to give you heart palpitations because you’re flustered by how much you’re swooning. Not because you’re afraid that every move he makes in front of that hi-tech election map is going to determine whether or not democracy and civilization as we know it will continue to exist.

Yet here I was, as I’ve been every election cycle, chewing my fingernails down until I bleed, rooting on my Khaki King while watching the presidential election results roll in. This year, I invited some guest stars to the anxiety party. (Sorry, Steve: We’re “open,” right?) Rachel Maddow, Bret Baier, David Muir, Savannah Guthrie…I’m sorry you’ve all been roped into this mess, but I suspect you knew this would happen.

There is no television as pointless, produced with as much hollow vision, or as least likely to provoke conversation than what has become of election night coverage in 2024.

From 4 pm ET into the early hours, I sampled so many channels’ coverage that I thought I was inventing acronyms. I had to whisper into my phone the world’s most disturbing four words: “Download Fox News app.” I did. It was surprisingly boring.

There’s a wild dissonance between the frustration over our country’s state of affairs and the way it plays out in the media, as if it’s ordinary or normal. That’s my biggest takeaway from Election Night: We’re supposed to expect that this huge event will change our lives. But the coverage of it, from my perspective, followed such a blueprint of elections from four, eight, or 12 years ago. If you told me what I was watching was footage from 2016, let alone 2020, I would believe you.

I began the night with NBC.

Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt flashed footage of the long lines across the country with a countdown clock to the polls closing. It cemented what would become a constant annoyance throughout the night: Knowing nothing isn’t interesting; no matter what channel you watch, who their marquee star is, and what the resources are.

I tuned into the Brian Williams Amazon experiment. The streaming special was aimed at young voters—I guess the mysterious ones who think, “An election is coming, I must find the complicated way to access a Brian Willaims redemption special on a streaming platform.” Reports are they’re still arguing with their Rokus.

After tuning in, I can report that the blinding LED screen that is Williams’ backdrop is impressive, and based on that vivid imagery, I have no idea what character he is playing in the Wicked movie, but I assume it’s a major one.

Williams’ graphics department seemed similarly confused. Multiple times he was calling a state for Harris or Trump, but the TV screen showed the wrong state. When I tuned back in later in the night, Williams was reading results off his iPhone, while the camera was trained on him and the background LED screen radiating behind.

I hold no ill will to pundits. Especially on Election Day. It has to be exhausting. Props to every expert who said everything over the course of the six or seven hours I was watching results roll in, on every channel. The outlet doesn’t matter. It was the same monologue on every channel. “Well, we have stats that say people are voting for Harris, and we also have stats saying they are voting for Trump.”

On three different channels I heard someone compare the cost of eggs to abortion rights.

My poor pillow has done its service; it’s been screamed into enough.

This night of watching so much election TV has led me to a big question: Why do we torture ourselves with this exercise?

Have you ever walked into a restaurant and clearly everyone knows each other, and they’re singing a song that is obscure but they all love it? They start crying because it’s so moving, yet you’re thinking, “Whaaaaaat….did I just walk into?” Well, at about 9:30 pm ET. I put on Fox News. That’s what it’s like.

I have watched NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Amazon Prime, and Fox News on election night, from a critical eye, trying to discern what’s “good” election TV. My conclusion: No one knows. These telecasts have been horrible.

My hour watching Fox News felt like a lobotomy, and I don’t mean that in a “didn’t give it a chance” way. I had watched Maddow and Muir and other shows beforehand, where policy and statistics were paramount. When Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum appeared on my screen, they legitimately had nothing to say about the election. They just started barking. No one, at this point—and no matter how many LED walls you throw at them—has anything interesting to say.

You know how fun and not totally annoying at all it’s been to go to brunch with your friends and hear the prompt, “So what do you think of the election?” Well, apply millions of dollars that are given to networks for wall-to-wall coverage where no one says anything more insightful than your friend-of-a-friend Ashley, and you have a sense of what coverage was like in the evening hours of Election Night 2024.

For so much of the day, every broadcast channel was a very dramatic hamster wheel, assuming the hamster you brought home in grade school and accidentally killed had a fabulous blowout during the process. There was real grasping at straws for drama: At around 6:45 pm ET, CNN played a music cue so dramatic that Law & Order would be embarrassed. I braced myself for some cataclysmic news. No, instead Anderson Cooper was throwing to an anchor who was delivering an exit poll about whether or not people “like” Kamala Harris.

We watch these things so closely because we’re trained to, but also because we need the comfort. I don’t know what Amazon’s wild LED screen cost, but I know that it should have made me more excited than I am about technology. It is gratifying when a project can be siloed because it airs on one platform, or can only be seen on another. But I think there’s something different going on with the election coverage, which this year was more readily available than it’s ever been.

I think we revert to the fact that some of the coverage is gated or not easy to access as a reassurance: Who knows what’s going on, but I can’t respond because I can’t see it. But we’re not in a world where things are siloed, or gated, or not a part of a narrative. These last 1,000 words all contribute to a future. My edit will too.