While Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled it out for the presidency, a war was being fought in the shadows among the networks trying to draw in viewers to their election coverage.
Millions of Americans were glued to their TV sets on Tuesday night, watching the results roll in, with one news channel trouncing its competitors in the ratings: Fox News.
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum led the network’s primetime election coverage on Democracy 2024, garnering an average of 10.3 million viewers between 8pm and 11pm ET on Tuesday evening, according to Nielsen data.
It marks the second consecutive election cycle where Fox News – a Rupert Murdoch majority-owned, right-leaning network – raked in the most TV viewers on election night.
MSNBC came in second, with 6 million average viewers. It marks the first time that MSNBC has topped CNN, with the network bringing in just 5.1 million viewers – almost half of its 9.6 million audience in the 2020 presidential election.
ABC brought in almost 5.9 million viewers, NBC 5.5 million and CBS 3.6 million.
Fox News’s audience was still down from its record 13.8 million viewers during the 2020 election.
Overall, network ratings also plunged by about 25 percent, with 42.3 million people tuning into Tuesday’s broadcasts across 18 networks – compared with 56.9 million last election cycle.
A shift away from linear television in lieu of streaming services and social media, particularly among those under the age of 50, is believed to be blamed in part for the waning figures.
Fox News also topped YouTube’s live-streaming charts, amassing more than 1.1 million streams at its peak on election night, according to data from live-streaming database Streams Charts.
All-in-all, almost 84 million hours of content was streamed online for election coverage on Tuesday, with more than 80 percent of views coming from YouTube, Streams Charts found.
MSNBC announced that its YouTube channel had a record-breaking 30 million video views in a day on Tuesday.
As news outlets began declaring Donald Trump the winner on Wednesday morning, Fox News maintained its dominance in the ratings.
Fox – which was first to declare Trump the winner – said it topped out at 7.4 million viewers during the 1am hour when its Decision Desk called Pennsylvania for Trump, giving him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to take the White House once more.
Other networks, newspapers and news agencies called the race for Trump later on Wednesday morning.
“FOX News dominated every aspect of this historic election cycle,” Fox News Media’s CEO Suzanne Scott said in a statement.
“From primary debates to town halls to being the only network to conduct interviews with all four candidates in both parties in a one-week span as Bret Baier helmed the most buzzed about interview of the race.”
