Happier returns
Today: Gabriel Snyder, editor and journalist.
Issue No. 189
Election Night Step 1: Turn Off the TV
Gabriel Snyder
Hydra SWAG: Last Chance!
The Editors
Election Night Step 1: Turn Off the TV
by Gabriel Snyder
I know you’re nervous. I am, too! The definitive presidential election night experience, for me, was in 2000 when Gore was winning, and then he wasn’t, and all of a sudden, Bush was (maybe) winning. After many years of enjoying watching election returns come in—even looking forward to it!—I have been thinking about how to learn the news of who’s winning without plunging myself into an anxiety abyss.
1. Turn Off the TV. The last time I watched cable TV news on election night, or really ever, was 2016. Or rather, the TV was pretty much background noise while I scrolled Twitter. Still, it was apparent that I was learning literally nothing from the TV talking heads and their magic projection boards. The TV business is fundamentally show business, and the show they aim for on election night is as full of jump scares and anxiety as any B-movie slasher film. Just turn the cable news off, preferably forever.
2. Gather Some Friends. Don’t go through the night alone doomscrolling. If you can’t physically gather with people, get a group text of sympathetic, trustworthy friends. Set rules and boundaries in advance, if you need to. Maybe sharing news of the latest state calls is fine; maybe dropping random memes is not.
3. Turn Off X/Twitter. Scrolling the feed will not help you (stay up on the news, calm your nerves, feel like you’re sharing this moment with others, etc.). And you are not helping anyone else by reading or (omfg, please don’t do this!) posting through it. And for that matter, stay off Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, etc., too. A fast-moving feed of posts is not what you need on election night.
4. Wait. Nothing is worse than the four hours or so between when people start hearing rumors about exit polls and when the polls actually close. All through dinnertime on the East Coast, all the media can and will offer is nudges and winks that are likely as not dead wrong (Let’s just say it could be a very interesting night for John Kerry). The real poll is going on, the one that counts. Do something else until the genuine results come in.
5. Remember How to Browse the Web. OK, cable news is off, X/Twitter is deleted, but you still need to know the news. You know who else wants to give you the news? Literally every other news organization on the planet. Pick one that you like and refresh their live updates page. Between that and an active group chat, I promise you will be just as current as the people glued to cable and X/Twitter. Do something that will take your mind off the election for 15 or 30 minutes at a time (play a board game, do a jigsaw puzzle, cook an elaborate recipe) and then refresh the site you’re following to find out that, with 80 percent of the vote counted, Trump is projected to win Kentucky.
6. But I Really Really Want to Know the Latest. Are you sure? You don’t know how else you’ll get through the night? OK, there is one more thing you can do. But you have to promise me that if I tell you, you won’t wander off scrolling through the X/Twitter feed. What you need is a very, very small hand-curated list of accounts on X/Twitter that is ONLY people who are experts at counting votes. If you need some help, I have a list of 40 accounts you might check out. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (who gave me the idea) has a larger list of nearly 150 accounts. You can easily bookmark either of those and just follow along (do not follow these lists and then view them in your main feed!)
I encourage you to make your own list so that you can easily boot people off who are annoying you by tweeting anything else but election returns.
Note that this technique works on Bluesky, too, where you can follow all the curated, zero-algorithm feeds you like. Here’s a U.S. election one. And a polling and data related “starter pack.”
7. Go to Bed. If there’s not a clear winner early, the second-worst time to watch cable news on Election Day is during the wee hours. The election won’t be decided at 4 a.m. Even poll workers eventually go to sleep. But the cable news business never rests. They may not know anything, but there’s still air to fill. And instead of filling the time with pre-planned segments that go up in the afternoon, you’re more likely to see exhausted people saying dumb things. This goes for the folks on X/Twitter, too. Things could stay uncertain and bad for days. And if that’s the case, you’re going to need to be well rested. Really: try to get some sleep.
And that’s the recipe. Follow it, and I promise your sanity will thank you for it.
SAVING AMERICA (WITH HYDRAS)
Join Hamilton Nolan this Sunday at the New York Society for Ethical Culture’s Sunday Platform, a community event featuring music, a luncheon, and a social hour.
America’s 50-year-long rise in economic inequality is the big crisis underlying most of our nation’s social and political problems... Can the labor movement seize its current moment of popularity as an opportunity to rebuild worker power and revive the American dream? Yes. But will it? That’s up to us.
Free and open to the public, in-person and online, on Sunday, November 3, 11:00 a.m. EST.
Hydra SWAG: Last Chance!
by The Editors
After our recent fundraiser ended, we learned that a bunch of people still wanted in, and then we learned from our friends at Kickstarter that we could reopen our pages for a few days to accommodate them. Many thanks to the wise and kind Oriana Leckert of Kickstarter for this good news.
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Again, this is a limited-time offer; we’ll hold it open for just a few days. Act Now!!
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