Despite Election Night’s Democratic wins, Fox News led the pack among its fellow cable news networks in primetime, with MSNBC following quite close behind.
Fox News averaged 2.92 million total viewers in primetime, while MSNBC averaged 2.88 million viewers and CNN averaged 1.91 million viewers, according to Nielsen big data plus panel viewership figures for Tuesday’s Election Night.
Fox News also led the pack in total day, with the right-leaning network scoring an average 1.78 million viewers, exceeding viewership for MSNBC, which scored 1.1 million viewers, as well as CNN, which averaged 742,000 viewers.
In the key cable news demo among adults 25-54, CNN led the networks in primetime with 621,000 viewers, outpacing MSNBC’s 509,000 demo viewers as well as Fox News’ 442,000 viewers. In total day, however, Fox News brought in the most demo viewers with 199,000 viewers, while CNN scored 183,000 viewers and MSNBC averaged 153,000 viewers.
On YouTube, Fox News averaged 10.16 million YouTube video views, according to Emplifi, while MSNBC averaged 9.44 million and CNN averaged 5.84 million. Likewise, NBC News averaged 3.91 million viewers while ABC News averaged 3.74 million views and CBS News averaged 1.72 million views. Numbers from YouTube Analytics brings NBC News’ views up 10.3 million total video views.
Comprehensive viewership numbers for Tuesday’s Election Night will be available later Wednesday. Last year’s Election Night coverage for the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brought in 42.3 million viewers across 18 TV networks from 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. EST, down 25.6% from the 2020 election, whose night-of coverage for the race between Joe Biden and Trump brought in 56.92 million viewers across 21 channels.
Tuesday saw several wins for the Democratic party, including in the governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City’s mayoral election.
