MSNBC Viewers Still Haven’t Returned Post-Election – Will They Ever Come Back?

More than a month after the November election, MSNBC’s primetime audience — which dropped by half after Donald Trump’s victory — has still not returned. Will viewers come back after the inauguration when the reality of a second Trump term sets in, or has some of the audience abandoned the network for good, signaling a further shift away from traditional media?

Either way, the numbers are stark. MSNBC’s total primetime audience has fallen a shocking 55% from November 4 through December 15, according to the latest Nielsen figures released on Tuesday.

CNN has faced a similar drop, a 46.7% decrease, while Fox News has seen its primetime audience grow 10.7%, according to Nielsen.

The reasons for the drop are being widely debated on social media, inside the cable news networks and in the media ecosystem in general. Some viewers clearly feel generally disappointed in the outcome of the election. Others are still angry at the network itself, whether for suggesting erroneously in the days before the election that Kamala Harris was nearing the winner’s circle, or because Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski visited Trump in Mar a Lago to mend fences after. Still others might simply be taking a respite from the news and will return after Trump takes office — as insiders at MSNBC contend.

Claire Potter, professor of history at The New School for Social Research, told TheWrap that to some MSNBC viewers, the election outcome feels like a bait and switch.

“It’s a sort of odd conjunction of what cable news channels have offered, which is, ‘You can trust us — come be part of our community. You’re safe here. We will not only keep you informed, but we will keep you organized and energized to defeat your opponents,’” she said. “That’s what’s coming in, and … the audience is buying it, hook, line and sinker. And then when it doesn’t work out, they get angry.”

Paired with the precipitous drop-off in linear viewership — with streaming growing to a record share of 41.6% for November’s TV viewing, per Nielsen’s Gauge report — Potter said she’s unsure whether audiences will “return in the kind of numbers that the [linear] corporations want,” pointing to MSNBC being one of several cable assets that NBCUniversal will spin-off into a standalone, publicly traded company.

Oliver Darcy, founder of the media newsletter Status, wondered if some viewers have permanently turned to other news sources, from podcasts to YouTube channels to newsletters.

“Something broader’s going on,” he told TheWrap. “Some people are depressed. Others feel betrayed. Some are tuning out for the holidays. It can be a cocktail of things happening here.”

Darcy himself is an example of a former CNN journalist taking audiences with him to his new venture. “[Cable news is] definitely facing increased competition that they haven’t seen before. It’s going to hurt them at the end of the day,” he said. “If I’m getting your attention, I’m taking it from someone else.”

With broken trust and an avalanche of alternative news sources available, MSNBC’s recent decline could spell more trouble ahead for the cable news establishment.

But maybe it’s temporary…

The thinking inside MSNBC is that viewership will pick up in the new year after Trump’s inauguration, according to an insider who spoke to TheWrap. The ratings drop falls in line with historical patterns after a Republican presidential victory — including Trump’s first win in 2016 — according to this individual. But whether that bears out remains to be seen.

MSNBC brought in an average primetime viewership of 1.34 million in 2024 leading up to the election, but the total primetime audience has fallen 55% to 601,000 viewers, according to Nielsen figures through Dec. 15.

Christina Bellantoni, director of USC Annenberg’s Media Center, believes the MSNBC audience is just taking a break and will return. “People want good, solid reporting. They want reporting that aligns with their own ideology and they just want to tune out at the moment,” she told TheWrap.

But Darcy said that could quickly change if Trump starts making provocative moves. “Let’s say Trump starts going in and deporting people,” he said. “I have a hard time believing people won’t turn on cable news for that moment. If Kash Patel is FBI director, there is going to be a lot of newsy stuff that will get people to pay attention.” 

The shift away from traditional media

MSNBC might be in for some reinvention, whether that leads to layoffs or bolstering its streaming arm, as legacy media finds itself in a “precarious position,” Bellantoni said. The shift away from traditional media outlets has given an opening to newcomer centrist cable network NewsNation, which, in its third year, just outpaced MSNBC’s weekend programming for seven hours in the key 25-54 demographic.

But the main competition is coming from YouTube and podcasts, as Bellantoni called the 2024 presidential race the “podcast election.” YouTube, which is quickly becoming the go-to platform for podcasts, drove 67 million hours of election coverage viewership and it’s not slowing down. While the move to finding news via podcasts or social media has been largely attributed to younger generations, Bellantoni said “a lot of people of all ages only get their news from vertical video they are swiping past.”

While MSNBC was the most-watched cable news network on YouTube in 2024 with 3.1 billion views, there’s serious competition coming from less traditional shows on the platform. Bellantoni noted that an interview on “Meet the Press” doesn’t benefit a politician as much as sitting down with a podcaster the politician likes.

This point is further underscored by Trump’s three-hour Joe Rogan interview — which became the biggest episode in the show’s history — and the finger-pointing that ensued after Harris declined to adjust her schedule to participate in one of her own. Many saw that as a fumble given Rogan’s working class listeners are exactly the kind of voters that went for Trump in big numbers. She appeared on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” instead.

“Those little clips can be shared the same way a television interview can be shared, but the actual entry point for that is much more intimate in somebody’s ears, and it allows for somebody to really talk at length, as opposed to being questioned by somebody that either has training as a journalist or has a journalistic mission in mind: 1) to make news and 2) to verify new information,” Bellantoni said.

“People are exhausted”

While the MSNBC ratings drop is comparable to what happened the first time Trump was elected in 2016, Potter noted the aftermath of the 2024 election “lacks the energy of 2016 where anger quickly turned into action.” 

“I think people are exhausted, and I think they’re looking for people to blame,” she said. 

That blame is piling up on MSNBC, which viewers and pundits say failed to adequately spotlight the anger and frustration in middle-class and Latino voters over issues like inflation and immigration. For liberals, Trump’s re-election doesn’t compute with the trust they put in commentators like Rachel Maddow, whom Potter says is imbued with a “kind of supernatural power to make things OK, when no newscaster can make something OK [or] can make the government OK or make politics OK.”

I think people are exhausted, and I think they’re looking for people to blame. – Claire Potter, professor of history at The New School for Social Research

“People often believe that their media consumption is a way of participating in politics, and to a certain extent, symbolically, it is, but practically speaking, it isn’t,” Potter said. “The desire to pull back to say, ‘All right, I’m done with these people — they didn’t get me the outcome I wanted’ is a way of finding someone to blame, when, in fact, there were so many factors that went into Donald Trump’s re-election.”

Bellantoni echoed Potter’s sentiments, saying some left-leaning viewers are “hands in the air, fed up with everything” — a frustration that was only further fueled by Scarborough and Brzezinski’s meeting with Trump. “There’s a little bit of that, ‘You spend two years effectively being the opposition to this guy, and now you’re gonna kiss butt.”

But she noted that Harris supporters may be taking this time to “totally disconnect” in an effort to avoid getting the “outrage meter going with every breaking news alert,” opting to wait until the inauguration to tune back into politics.

We’ve been here before

There doesn’t seem to be any panic over the ratings decline at MSNBC. A ratings dip was always expected at the network after Trump’s re-election, the individual close to the network maintained, and is on par with the drop in primetime ratings seen after Trump’s 2016 win, as well as President Joe Biden’s debate with Trump during the summer of 2024.

While 2016’s total day audience only dropped 25% in the week following the election, primetime viewership was down 41% month-over-month after Trump’s 2016 win, and the network saw a similar drop-off after George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, when MSNBC saw a 49% decline. 

The ratings dips go both ways, as Fox News saw similar declines in viewership following Democratic presidential wins, including dropping 49% after Biden’s election in 2020. Fox News also saw declines after Barack Obama’s two presidential wins, dropping 37% in 2008 — which also saw a 40% decline for MSNBC — and 50% in 2012.

In 2016, MSNBC averaged 1.09 million primetime viewers through the Sunday before the election, and dropped below 1 million average viewers — hitting as low as 600,000 viewers during the last week of December — for each week through the rest of 2016 before rebounding to its pre-election levels by January, which averaged 1.16 million viewers. Viewership grew in February with an average 1.49 million viewers and, in March 2017, MSNBC averaged 1.71 million viewers — up 17% from the combined 1.46 million total viewers in September and October 2016.

Despite pay TV households dropping 28% from 2016, MSNBC’s primetime audience through the Sunday before the election in 2024 was up 21% from 2016, so interest was certainly high ahead of the Harris-Trump showdown.

When Trump returns to the Oval Office in January he’ll certainly kick off another flurry of news items — he’s promised to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists in his first minutes in office. The question before the network and media pundits is, will people flock back to MSNBC to digest the news, or have they migrated to new media for good?

Sharon Waxman contributed reporting to this story.

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