The best moment: Karl Rove gets shirty with Fox News, live on air
The "most arresting spectacle" of election night, as Adweek put it, was Fox News analyst Karl Rove "aggressively disagreeing" with the network’s decision to call Ohio for President Obama.
At around 11:15 p.m. Fox's onsite team of analysts let anchor Chris Wallace know it was time to declare Ohio a win for Obama . This put an Electoral College victory out of reach for Romney.
Wallace made the official call, telling viewers that the Romney campaign had “real doubts about the call that’s been made by us and, I guess, other networks about Ohio. They do not believe that Ohio is in the Obama camp.”
The reason : Only three-quarters of the votes cast in Ohio had been counted.
Rove said he believed the call was premature. So presenter Megyn Kelly, Adweek relates, took a long on-camera walk to the room where the analysts were at work.
“We are actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio,” the lead analyst told Kelly. “Basically, right now there is too much Obama vote that’s outstanding that we know is going to come in."
When Kelly returned to the anchor desk, Rove didn't budge , saying he felt it was still far too early to make the call, given the 991-vote margin Obama enjoyed over Romney at the moment.
Of course, the call was spot on. With 99 percent of the ballots counted, Obama had 50.1 percent of the votes to Romney’s 48.2 percent. At that point there were 2,672,302 votes or Obama and 2,571,539 for Romney—a difference of 100,763 in the president’s favour.
Romney conceded in Boston shortly before 1 a.m. A possible explanation for the delay : earlier in the day Romney boasted to to journalists that he’d “only written one speech at this point.”
Donald Trump also made it into the ridicule headlines. Shortly after NBC announced Obama’s victory, Trump made what Adweek called " a heated and asinine series of tweets."
Mistakenly believing that Romney had won the popular vote, Trump, host of NBC’ show Celebrity Apprentice, called for “revolution,” on Twitter. He announced, “Our great nation is a once great nation divided!”
NBC anchor Brian Williams said, “Donald Trump, who has driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something closer to irresponsible here, is tweeting tonight,” then read more Trump messages.
On Twitter, Trump then called Williams a “dummy” and ridiculed NBC News’ ratings. In fact NBC’s coverage won the night, averaging 12.6 million viewers ABC had 11.2 million viewers and CBS 8.42 million viewers