It would take a lot longer than a couple of hours of twitter being down for that to have a useful effect. For something as major as the presidential election result, it would probably take minimum a week before people got bored and moved on to a different topic.
So this kind of attack that only takes something out for a few hours would have no useful effect for an actor that wants to prevent people from discussing a recent event.
IMHO, it would be hard in general to take out a service run by a serious IT organization (of which there are admittedly few, by my definition of serious) for more than a few days unless the attacker carried out non-trivial physical damage (eg, bombing multiple datacenters, murdering multiple system administrators, etc) or managed to somehow destroy enough backups (which in a serious IT shop, should be hard, as there should be some offline cold backups that require physical human activity to destroy)
... Perhaps if you try to argue that they did it in order to make sure everyone was on edge for the election... but even then it makes very little sense.