CNN topped Thursday night’s election coverage with an average of 6.3 million primetime viewers, beating Fox News for the second night in a row in networks’ ongoing competition to track Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s nailbiter presidential race.
Fox News had 5.6 million viewers last night, MSNBC got 4.9 million.
The rankings for Thursday in the key news demographic, adults ages 25-54, for the cable news channels were the same. Among that group, CNN took 2.9 million viewers, Fox News drew 1.5 million and MSNBC had 1.3 million.
CNN also won again in terms of “total day,” a timeframe that for these purposes counted 3 a.m. Thursday to 3 a.m. Friday, in both the demo and in terms of total viewers.
Another night came and went with no winner of the 2020 presidential election, though pretty much everything is skewing in Joe Biden’s favor at this point. President Donald Trump called that fraud, but pretty much no one else has.
At the time of this writing, Biden had pulled ahead of Trump in both Georgia and Pennsylvania. The blue team was still leading the red team in Arizona and in Nevada. If Biden wins Pennsylvania, the state in which he was born, it is game over and he is the next president of the United States of America. If he just wins Georgia and literally nothing else, Biden and Trump would end up in a tie, both with 269 electoral votes.
At this point, anything but an outright Biden win, which Trump has vowed to contest, seems highly unlikely.
On Wednesday, CNN topped primetime (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) with an average of 7.1 million total viewers, besting Tuesday’s top channel Fox News by about 800,000 people. MSNBC finished a semi-distant third with 4.8 million viewers.
CNN also bested Fox News Channel (and everyone else) in the main demo and won Wednesday’s “total day” outright. As a matter of fact, in that 24-hour view, Wednesday was CNN’s second most-watched day in 40 years.
On actual Election Night 2020, Fox News Channel dominated primetime television with an average of 13.6 million viewers. All told, 21 channels combined to deliver 56.9 million primetime viewers overall on Tuesday, which was 20% down from Election Night 2016. Of the 56.9 million viewers, CNN was responsible for 9.1 million.
CNN Digital had its best day ever Wednesday, CNN said, boasting 116 global unique users, with Thursday coming in as second-largest with 87 million.
Fox News also had its highest day ever of digital engagement, the channel said, with 28.5 million live streams.
Jennifer Maas contributed to this story.