“We have to remember the boat parades!”—Dana Perino
Last night, the 2020 presidential election finally arrived, and I spent it watching Fox News for roughly nine hours. I’m glad that I did, because around 11:20 p.m. the network’s Decision Desk, chillingly known as the Nerdquarium by its employees, shocked and rocked the nation by calling Arizona for Joe Biden, roughly a day before anyone else.
Up until that point, it had been a surprisingly sedated evening at the usually pugnacious network. But the Arizona call outraged the Trump campaign and quickly prompted challenges from the Fox News anchors leading the election coverage, Brett Baier and Martha McCallum. It wasn’t quite Megyn Kelly marching down to the Decision Desk backroom in 2012, but Baier and McCallum repeatedly and somewhat peevishly pushed back against their network’s own projection, demanding answers from no less than three Desk members, including Arnon Mishkin, who was recently outed in the paper of record as a Hillary-voting “nerd.” But the nerd stood his ground, and he was right. Arizona, land of Joe Arpaio and the last of the contiguous states to be admitted to the Union, was the first Molotov cocktail hurled at the night’s narrative.
Before then, the election had seemed stubbornly content to replicate 2016. Donald Trump won Arizona that year on the way to his spectacular underdog victory, and this apparent reversal in desert fortune immediately snapped Twitter Democrats out of their predictable delirium. Projecting Arizona for Biden so early showed the boldness of the Nerdquarium brain trust—rumpled data crunchers who, unlike many Fox News personalities, are almost certainly not on a first-name basis with the president, who dismissed the call during his 3 a.m. “victory speech.” This dramatic clash between math and feelings—as opposed to the frantic gesticulations of nerd hunk Steve Kornacki on MSNBC and the snippy tango of John King and Wolf Blitzer on CNN—epitomized a network assiduously dedicated to spectacle.
Before that moment, the expected extravaganza of a night with the dramatis personae of Fox News had been rather tame. Sedate Dick Tracy villain Brett Baier and bland Martha McCallum anchored the proceedings with a master class of rote dullness. They had the easy chemistry of two people who literally knew each other from the office. Their function is largely to give Fox News the appearance of a place where non-insane people hold somewhat important positions of power. They made canned jokes and monotonously repeated conventional wisdom, imbuing the proceedings with the staid pretense of impartiality.
Earlier in the day, Fox continually showed the same clips of boarded-up storefronts and abandoned city streets in an effort to inject some ominous stakes into the night’s proceedings. A Trump victory would lead to a massive Antifa counterattack was the fun and responsible implication. “If you are in the plywood business, you had a very good day!” Chris Wallace quipped.
And then the much-vaunted Blue Wave never came, and Baier and McCallum watched with just as much amazement as everyone else that the polls had somehow, once again, underestimated Trump. But as Trump’s numbers continued to climb and the pro-Biden mathematical augury of just a few days ago began to evaporate, Fox’s team of wolves (Chris Wallace excepted) visibly realized the script was being rewritten, and pounced on it—until Arizona happened.
Brit Hume was obsessed with the betting markets. Juan Williams rambled as his fellow election panel members stared at him expectantly, hoping against hope for a point. Dana Perino, the austere former Press Secretary who served under George W. Bush, dropped confusing aphorisms aplenty, including my favorite, “There are a lot of parents in America.” Harris Faulkner had seemingly kidnapped four random voters, two Trump loyalists and two for Biden, who appeared early on in the proceedings, only to vanish for hours, until they were finally brought back for one brief confusing segment about police reform. Stuart Varney popped in briefly to drone on about the DOW and Nasdaq. Token interactive map maven Bill Hemmer sadly lacked the almost unhinged vibe of MSNBC’s Kornacki. (The person in charge of Fox News’ touch-screen map should be an absolute partisan maniac, I think we can all agree.) Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham joined the party a few times to gloat over the media’s failure to understand Donald Trump’s appeal.