Los Angeles: There is only one thing Americans love more than America, and that is elections. Everyone and everything in America that isn’t bolted down is elected, from the town clerk, school superintendents and tax commissioner … to the president.

And the only thing America loves more than elections is television. When you put the two together, you get a circus of patriotism and stretched faces draped in red, white and blue flags, and introduced by news anchors who, at times, look more like ringmasters.

US election TV coverage … kind of like a Zoom meeting.

The sheer scale of America – a population 12-fold ours, with many hundreds more television channels – means everything is inevitably bigger. In Australia, we have the ABC and SBS, three commercial networks and Sky News pecking for the people-meter crumbs. In America, they have more news channels than we have actual channels.

Atop the pile are the apex predators of this political Colosseum: CNN, with Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash and Kaitlan Collins, and Fox News, with Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum and Kellyanne Conway. Between them, they dominated election eve chatter and will doubtless carve off the lion’s share of the audience.

But four years after an election night that pushed the nation to the verge of a nervous breakdown, even higher stakes this time round have left everyone with a collective knot in their stomachs.........

© The Age