Broadcast TV Overtakes Cable on Midterm Election Night
For the first time in six election cycles, more people watched midterm returns on broadcast TV than on cable. The Hollywood Reporter reported Nielsen figures showing that 57 percent of primetime viewers on election night, Tuesday, November 3, watched on broadcast networks.
Broadcast means the over-the-air channels such as NBC, ABC, CBS, Univision, Telemundo and PBS. Cable means the paid channels delivered through a subscription. Primetime refers to the main evening viewing hours.
In total, 31.21 million people watched primetime election coverage across 13 broadcast and cable outlets. That is up from 25.43 million for the 2022 midterms. Of that audience, 17.79 million watched on broadcast and 13.42 million on cable.
The split has flipped. In 2022, 57 percent of midterm viewers watched on cable. Broadcast networks had not drawn a clear majority of election-night viewers in 14 years, and in 2016 the two sides sat at roughly 50-50.
NBC finished first among all networks with 6.74 million primetime viewers, more than doubling its 2022 average. It also topped the election-night chart in 2012. ABC drew 5.19 million viewers, up 57 percent from four years ago. CBS drew 2.76 million, up 8 percent from 2022.
The Spanish-language networks also drew large audiences. Univision recorded 1.54 million primetime viewers, Telemundo 1.06 million, and PBS about 500,000.
On the cable side, CNN's midterm coverage was up 59 percent from 2022, according to a Hollywood Reporter report on the same night's figures.
The shift sits alongside a change in how people pay for TV. Homes with multichannel providers, the paid packages sold by cable, satellite and phone companies, now make up 42.5 percent of TV homes. Four years ago the figure was 52.3 percent. That is a loss of more than 10 million households.
For the networks, the night was a strong one. For cable, it was a year of growth in audience, but a smaller share of the total. Both numbers are part of the same picture.
