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Tuesday night’s election coverage for the 2024 presidential election scored monster ratings, with Fox News unsurprisingly leading the pack in early figures.
As viewers tuned in to watch results spill in for the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Fox News brought in 9.77 million viewers during its primetime coverage from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. EST, according to Nielsen fast national ratings (this story will be updated when final numbers arrive later Wednesday).
Fox News scored the biggest audience among the major cable news networks, with MSNBC coming next with 5.5 million viewers in primetime, beating CNN’s primetime audience of 4.7 million viewers. The 2024 election marks the first time in network history that MSNBC outpaced CNN on a presidential election night.
As CNN live-streamed its coverage across Max and other digital platforms, CNN’s election day coverage brought in more than 13.7 million multiplatform viewers, ranking as the highest day of viewership on CNN Max since its launch. During election day, approximately 20% of the Max viewers watched election coverage.
On the broadcast side, ABC News outpaced its competition with 5.67 million viewers in primetime, ahead of NBC with 5.32 million viewers. CBS came next with 3.49 million viewers while Fox brought in 2.14 million viewers. As ABC scored 2.16 million viewers in the 25-54 demo and 1.82 viewers in the 18-49 demo, coverage for the 2024 race marked the first time in 16 years that ABC dominated amongst all three demos during election night.
In 2020, election night coverage for the race between Joe Biden and Trump — whose results ended up stretching into the weekend — brought in 56.92 million viewers across 21 channels.
At the time, viewership for 2020 election night coverage was down 20.3% from the 2016 race, which saw a viewership of 71.43 million as Trump claimed victory against Hillary Clinton. Election night in 2012 reached 66.84 million viewers, while 2008 coverage brought in 71.47 million viewers and 2004’s election night scored 55.05 million viewers.
