Did Midterm Elections Cause Changes in News World Order?

And the real winner of the U.S. 2026 midterms is — Steve Kornacki?

More viewers of traditional TV elected to watch NBC News coverage of the voting during primetime, according to data from Nielsen, but the figures suggest some shifts in overall viewership patterns — some expected, and some not. NBC widened the number of hours it devoted to the evening, and launched a stand-alone “Kornacki Cam” that let viewers watch the data analyst on a special streaming outlet in addition to his appearances alongside colleagues Savannah Guthrie, Tom Llamas, Kristen Welker, Hallie Jackson and Ryan Nobles.

NBC News’ primetime coverage of the nation voting to give Democrats control over both the U.S. House and Senate won an average of 6.74 million viewers overall, compared with 5.19 million for ABC News and 4.315 million for Fox News Channel. MS NOW, which was expected to see a surge of audience as the nation tilted to the left, had fewer overall viewers than any other mainstream outlet except for CBS News.

In recent years, ABC News and Fox News Channel have typically emerged from critical Election Nights with the greatest command of overall viewership. The conservative Fox News crowd likely didn’t thrill to seeing a “blue wave” by Democrats oust Republicans from their control of Congress, but there’s no obvious answer for the decline at the Disney news outlet. And the Democratic surge was not mirrored in the viewership statistics for MS NOW.

CNN won bragging rights for leading cable in the critical audience between 25 and 54, the demographic favored most by advertisers in news programming. CNN attracted 1.512 million viewers in that category, compared with 771,000 for Fox News Channel and 665,000 for MS NOW. NBC and ABC captured the biggest and second-largest demo crowd, 2.794 million and 1.672 million.

An estimated 31.2 million people in all watched primetime coverage of the 2026 U.S. midterms across 13 linear TV networks, according to Nielsen, compared with 25.4 million across 12 networks in 2022.

Of the 31.2 million people that tuned in, 57% watched coverage on broadcast networks, Nielsen said, while 43% watched coverage on cable.

TV networks in 2026 vied with a host of new voices tapping digital platforms to connect with audience niches. While both Kornacki, MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and Fox News Channel’s Ruthless podcast team were spotted in these digital channels, a wide range of upstarts and former TV faces — people like Piers Morgan, Chuck Todd, Katie Couric, Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, Scott MacFarlane and Katie Phang — also made a play for the news crowd.

Media executives may sift through the data for all kinds of reasons. At Skydance, recently created through the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, management might be tempted to compare results at CNN and CBS News, both of which are now under the company’s umbrella. CNN’s coverage, led by Jake Tapper, John King, Dana Bash, Kaitlan Collins and a host of other familiar personalities, won the demo in cable and lured the third-largest audience. Though CBS News won more people between 25 and 54 than Fox News and MS NOW, it had the smallest overall crowd (though its viewership was up from 2022).

Some Fox News audience members are believed to be grappling with “viewer fatigue,” according to Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who said as much during a recent call with investors. While Murdoch didn’t say as much, Fox viewers may not want to tune in at a moment in the news cycle when Democrats are on the rise. On Election Night, Fox News gave time to opinion hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who nodded to some of the problems President Trump’s policies had caused Americans, even as they tried to support his vision.

Major shifts in the political tone of the nation have in the recent past sent TV-news outlets scrambling to match the tenor of the times. Not soon after President Trump was elected to his first White House term, NBC News lured Megyn Kelly from Fox News Channel in the belief more viewers wanted a conservative viewpoint. That pairing proved ill-fated, but if results and ratings from Tuesday night are any indication, there will be room for other experiments in the not too distant future.