Nearly 57 million tune in election night, down 20 percent from 2016

Nearly 57 million viewers tuned in to watch U.S. presidential election results on Tuesday night, according to final numbers from Nielsen Media Research, marking a 20 percent decline from four years ago when President Trump upset Hillary Clinton to take the White House.

Fox News was the most-watched network Tuesday night with 14.1 million viewers, an 18 percent increase from 2016. CNN came in second for major network coverage with 9.1 million total viewers. MSNBC was third with 7.31 million, an increase of 28 percent compared to four years ago.

ABC’s 6.3 million was first among the broadcast news networks, followed by NBC’s 5.63 million, CBS’s 4.34 million, and FOX-TV’s 3.28 million.

Among the business networks, Fox Business delivered 647,000 total viewers in prime time, while CNBC took in 117,000.

The 57 million viewers tuning in overall was also lower than those tuning in for the 2012 election night in the race between President Obama and Mitt Romney, when 66.8 million viewers tuned in.

Cord-cutting continues to eat into traditional television viewing, with more viewers, especially among young adults, turning to relatively inexpensive streaming options to watch the results instead.