UPDATE at 2:59 p.m.: Control of the House of Representatives is still unknown, but final viewing figures are in for Tuesday’s election, and it’s not a winner.

On 18 channels, Donald Trump’s resounding victory for his return to the White House from which he was expelled four years ago was followed by 42.3 million people, according to Nielsen. The measurement took place between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, hours before the final tally of Trump’s victory and Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat.

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The 42 million and change is a solid result in today’s decentralized media environment, by any standard other than the Super Bowl. However, as an indication of what and where Americans are getting their news, that prime-time audience was actually down 25% compared to the 2020 election that saw Joe Biden defeat Trump.

The media outlets used by Nielsen for its 2024 audience measurements 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, Brian Williams, the election special hosted by Amazon Prime Video, did not make the list.

As always, the majority of viewers were older. Those 55 and older made up 24.4 million of the 42.3 million who watched the election results.

PREVIOUSLY, 11:20 a.m.: Fox News Channel led the pack in primetime election coverage Tuesday night with 9.8 million tuning in from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET, according to early Nielsen data.

However, this is a significant decrease compared to the audience attracted by FNC in 2020when almost 14 million people watched it, which seems to be the case across the board, as all linear TV channels have struggled to capture as large an audience as they did four years ago.

Nielsen has not released its final figures, which will detail how many U.S. viewers watched election night coverage on nearly two dozen linear networks. These figures are based on early in-home viewing data and are likely to increase across the board when final Nielsen figures, which take into account out-of-home viewing, become available later on Wednesday. This article will be updated when this data becomes available.

After Fox News, it was a tug-of-war between broadcast and cable, with ABC being the night’s No. 1 broadcaster with about 5.6 million viewers in prime time. It was the first time in 16 years that ABC led not only in total viewers, but also in adults 18-49 (1.8 million) and 25-54 (2.2 million). ).

Meanwhile, MSNBC attracted 5.5 million viewers, surpassing CNN on a presidential election night for the first time in the network’s history. But while they were the cable winner of the night, MSNBC was still down from 2020’s 7.3 million viewers.

CNN saw a significant decline in its linear audience compared to 2020, essentially cutting its audience in half with just 4.7 million viewers, compared to 9.6 million four years ago. It was CNN’s smallest election night audience since 1996.

CNN had a digital and streaming component on CNN.com and Max for election coverage, which would not be considered here.

For the rest of the broadcast, NBC drew 5.3 million total viewers in prime time, and CBS got 3.4 million. Fox was last with 2.1 million – all significant declines compared to 2020 Also.

As mentioned, this data also doesn’t factor streaming into the equation, and many networks had digital components during this election cycle. Deadline will also update this post with any internal numbers released, although they cannot be compared as directly to each other as they are not independently verifiable.

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