Biden Got Bigger! Election Night Ratings For Trump’s White House Return Fall 25% From 2020 – Update
UPDATED 2:59 PM: Control of the House of Representatives is still unknown, but the final viewership numbers are in for Tuesday’s election, and it ain’t a winner.
Across 18 networks, Donald Trump’s sweeping victory for a return to the White House he was kicked out of four years ago was watched by an audience of 42.3 million, according to Nielsen. The measurement was in the 7 p.m. – 11 p.m. ET period, which was hours before the final tally of Trump’s win and Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss was in.
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The 42 million and change is a strong result in today’s decentralized media environment, by any non-Super Bowl standard. However, as an indication of what and where Americans are getting their news, that primetime viewership was actually down a hard 25% from the 2020 election that saw Joe Biden defeat Trump.
The outlets that Nielsen used for its 2024 ratings metric were ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CW, Merit Street Media, Scripps News, Telemundo, Univision, CNBC, CNN, CNNe, FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, MSNBC, Newsmax, NewsNation, and PBS. Not part of the linear gang, Amazon Prime Video’s Brian Williams hosted election special was not among the cut.
As always, the bulk of the viewers were older. Those 55 and up made up 24.4 million of the 42.3 million who watched the election results come in.
PREVIOUSLY, 11:20 AM: Fox News Channel led the pack in primetime election coverage Tuesday night with 9.8M tuning in from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET, according to early data from Nielsen.
However, this is a sharp decrease from the audience FNC drew in 2020, when nearly 14M watched, which seems to be the story across the board, as all linear TV channels struggled to capture as large of an audience as they did four years ago.
Nielsen hasn’t released its final numbers, which will detail just how many U.S. viewers watched Election Night coverage across nearly two dozen linear networks. These numbers are based on early, in-home viewing data and are likely to go up across the board when Nielsen’s final numbers, which take out-of-home viewing into account, are available later Wednesday. This post will be updated when that data is available.
Following Fox News, it was a tug of war between broadcast and cable, as ABC was the No. 1 broadcaster of the night with about 5.6M viewers in primetime. It was the first time in 16 years that ABC not only led broadcast in total viewers, but also among both adults 18-49 (1.8M) and 25-54 (2.2M).
Meanwhile, MSNBC drew 5.5M viewers, topping CNN on a presidential election night for the first time in network history. But while they were the cable winner of the night, MSNBC was still down versus 2020’s 7.3M viewers.
CNN was significantly down in linear viewership from 2020, essentially halving its audience with just 4.7M viewers, compared to 9.6M four years ago. It was CNN’s smallest Election Night audience since 1996.
CNN did have a digital and streaming component across CNN.com and Max to election coverage, which would not be accounted for here.
Across the remainder of broadcast, NBC drew 5.3M total viewers in primetime, and CBS got 3.4M. Fox was last with 2.1M — all major decreases from 2020 as well.
As mentioned, this data also doesn’t factor streaming into the equation, and many of the networks had digital components this election cycle. Deadline will also update this post with any internal numbers that are released, though they cannot be as directly compared to one another since they are not independently verifiable.
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