From nail-biting primaries to eye-popping ad budgets, the 2024 election rollercoaster has finally screeched to a halt – leaving Americans catching our breath as we coast toward January's Presidential Inauguration. The 2024 election was historic in many respects, with eleventh-hour plot twists and campaign spending that made Super Bowl commercials look like pocket change. 

Samba TV monitored the trends throughout, revealing how voters consumed everything from candidate town halls to the campaign ads that flooded their screens. Read on for a look at how America tuned in to 2024's political showdown.

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Trump and Harris ramped up TV appearances prior to the election

Just about every network featured political theater ahead of the November 5th election, as Trump and Harris duked it out across the media landscape, from Univisión to FOX News to Comedy Central. As part of their bid to court Hispanic voters, both candidates took the Univisión Town Hall hot seat – though Trump's appearance drew a bigger audience than Harris’ (637k households versus 583k). It's a viewership gap that corresponded with shifting political winds, as Trump's support among Hispanic voters surged 14 points since 2020.

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While Trump took to untraditional media like podcasts (harkening back to his successful 2016 campaign approach that leaned on social networks), Harris was particularly active with her TV appearances albeit not across traditional news networks. She appeared on lifestyle and comedy programs with events ranging from a Saturday Night Live appearance in early November that garnered 3.5M household views, outpacing any other week of SNL that month by 12%, to stints on The View (1.7M household views) and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (1.2M household views).

Perhaps relatedly, Americans also turned to fictional politics in the weeks leading up to the election. Veep, a comedy focused on the Vice President of America that ended in 2019, drew in 373k U.S. households during the first 20 days of October, which was a 261% increase from the prior month.

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Election Night 2024 drew a massive audience, with FOX News leading the ratings race

Election night 2024 proved that Americans still can't resist a good political nail-biter, with a whopping 35.6M households glued to their screens for the democratic drama. The average viewer watched about 2 hours and 13 minutes of the voter counts as they rolled in. 

FOX News claimed the ratings crown, drawing 9.8M households compared to CNN's 7.4M and MSNBC's 5.8M – though each network had its moment in the spotlight, with FOX News and MSNBC hitting their peak viewership at 7pm PST while CNN's audience surged an hour earlier. 

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Meanwhile, Spanish-language networks flexed their growing muscle, with 1.8M U.S. households watching Univisión election coverage and 1.3M watching Telemundo.

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Northeastern states and older viewers couldn’t tear themselves away from election coverage

‍Households in Washington DC were all-in on election coverage, with the nation's capital over-indexing on viewership by 11%. The Big Apple and Garden State weren't far behind, each hovering around 10% above average – proving the Northeast corridor remains America's capital of political rubbernecking. Meanwhile, some battleground states played it surprisingly cool, with North Carolina and Georgia viewers distinctly less glued to their screens (under-indexing by 9% and 4% respectively).

From a generational standpoint, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation dominated the election night audience, with households with members over 75 over-indexing by 12%, while millennial and Gen Z households were more likely to skip the broadcast.

The results are in and one thing's crystal clear: the 2024 election wasn't just a political event – it was must-see TV that drew massive viewership and engagement from audiences across the country.

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