For a little while on Tuesday evening “Election Night with Brian Williams” was the breaking political news equivalent of a meditation app. As CNN's John King and MSNBC's Steve Kornacki poked at states and districts on their respective touchscreen maps, Williams calmly emceed a polite conversation about the election from the center of a gigantic Los Angeles soundstage.
Behind him sprawled a digital backdrop which, from a straight-on camera angle, made him look like his desk was sitting in the middle of a highway dotted with American flags.
Two muscle cars were parked in the carpet of prairie brush over his shoulder. Elsewhere a long table populated with party strategists, consultants and media figures such as Puck founding partner Baratunde Thurston and “The View” alumnus Abby Huntsman debated the merits of red and blue mirages, in front of a classic red barn.
In another section of the set – which, again, looks like the inside of a warehouse – more experts chilled out quietly on couches that looked like they were procured from another Amazon warehouse. Somewhere else in the room Meta public affairs executive Erin McPike circled states and finger-painted numbers on a TV touchscreen that looked like something you’d find in any corporate meeting room.
When you don’t have a Decision Desk breaking your flow, as Williams assured his audience at the top of the streaming broadcast, you don’t have to worry about such things. The ragtag crew at “Election Night” was keeping an eye on everything for us – meaning, Williams received updates from other networks’ decision desks on his phone.
“Election Night” returned the longtime NBC and MSNBC anchor to the desk for a marathon night of gabbing about politics. Politely. So what if it looked slightly better produced than a local TV station’s public affairs program? It is merely an experiment in something passing for nonpartisan coverage, possibly helping Amazon to figure out how to get a foothold in the live, non-sports streaming events space where Disney and Netflix have always made inroads.
Williams opened the night with a voiceover narration of a letter to the nation's first leaders. "Dear Founding Fathers, first of all, about that more perfect union thing. We're not quite there yet, but we're working on it." That's one way to put it. From there Williams walked through all we achieved and had yet to achieve, and gamely included the acknowledgment that some of America's first heroes enslaved the ancestors of Black people who, against all the media hype, showed up in force.
Along the way Williams neglected to say the words, "Oh, and a bunch of folks supporting the Republican nominee for president mounted an insurrection on January 6, 2021" because this was not that kind of jamboree.
Instead he put it this way: "Last time we did this, it was far from the peaceful process you envisioned. No one ever said striving to be a more perfect union would be easy.
"Whatever happens tonight," he said in closing, "we'll have a republic tomorrow and the next day."
Who says live election coverage (on a platform founded by Jeff Bezos) can't be optimistic?
Prime Video made “Election Night” freely available, even to users without a subscription to Amazon Prime. For cable news junkies, it was a reunion of stars who left the business by choice or force, including former Fox anchor Shepard Smith, former CNN host Don Lemon and CNN’s longtime chief political correspondent Candy Crowley.
To the left was James Carville, hanging out in his polo shirt and looking increasingly glum as the evening wore on. From the conservative side of the fold were the likes of Kristin Davison of Axiom Strategies.
Most noticeable, though, were the absences. “Election Night” was free of blingy graphics, screeching chyrons and doom-soaked gongs and bells at the top of each hour. There was some of that whenever a result was called, which wasn’t as often as MSNBC, Fox News and CNN tolled throughout their telecasts.
Its calls were slightly behind their establishment news counterparts. Still, given the overall hesitancy to call most races aside from the obvious deep red and blue states, and Fox's early call of the entire race for Donald Trump, there wasn’t a great feeling that we were missing anything. Eventually, Democrats and those who voted with them realized their doom was upon them – but since that was the case, why rush into it?
Coming into this election night it was natural for one’s brain to feel . . . scrambled. Within months, the Democratic presidential campaign remade itself from President Joseph Biden who quit because his party believed he couldn’t win into a run for Vice President Kamala Harris who, the popular and misguided thinking went, couldn’t lose.
Anyone who dreaded another four years of Trump vacillated from hopelessness to euphoria to quiet dread. Joy spiked anew a day or two before the election when Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer saw a blip in the data placing Harris three points ahead in the Hawkeye state.
Even so, all indicators pointed to a race that looked close to a panic attack-triggering degree. That sentiment isn’t conducive to a night spent with an information delivery system designed to keep the audience straining on tenterhooks. Some viewers live for this stress, grant you.
Even that had its limits. A few hours into Kornacki doing what he does best, TV writer Sierra Ornelas posted on X what I and surely many others were thinking. “I’ve reached the point where I wanna kiss Kornacki and I also want to punch him,” she said. “Does that make sense?” The post has since disappeared.
The cable news landscape has long been a locus of information overload, which only accelerated during Trump’s first presidency. Election night coverage on the three major cable news networks further highlighted how stark the split has become between left-leaning reporting on MSNBC and Fox’s right-wing coverage.
On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and its election team were sanguine about the Democrats’ odds, reflecting the sunnier side of the polls which, yet again, misjudged several key factors, including the extent to which Latinos and Gen Z white men broke for Trump. On Fox, Jesse Watters was calling Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Megyn Kelly “a murderers row of intellects” backing the former president.
As for their view of Harris as the night began, Fox star Greg Gutfeld had this nugget of exit poll insights. “It is interesting that 70% say this country is going in the wrong direction. Isn't it ironic that it's the woman who refuses to ask for directions?”
The expected position of CNN in all this is center, allegedly – and certainly King and Jake Tapper did their straitlaced best to lead us into an obviously unexpected turn of events, greased by terms like “slippage” and fluffed by interrupting gongs heralding “too close to call” non-alerts.
Within that ranking, “Election Night” was the perfect combination of checking in and checking out. Many, including me, described it as lo-fi, and definitely lower budget, like that nice dive down the street that says it offers food but actually features a nearby joint's takeout menu and a barback willing to pick up your order.
But honestly, spending time with Williams’ news cave jamboree wasn’t terrible. With polling analyses from Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight entirely whacked and social media echo chambers devolving from steady to utterly freaked out as the evening wore on, Williams’ election information missile silo was a bastion of calm.
There was no gleeful chuckling or smiles masking malaise, only respectful discussion between people on either side of the political fence, or straddling it, about what this outcome tells us about who we are and how we, as a nation, should process these results.
If Nov. 5 ends up representing the grand finale for American democracy – then “Election Night” will be remembered as that weird companion holding our hands as the first flashes went off on the distant horizon. It may end up being a one-time affair. But if it does come back, I hope it doesn’t change anything besides, maybe, a screen upgrade.
