The Resistance is turning their TV sets back on.
After seeing its audience cut in half following Donald Trump’s victory as “exhausted” liberal viewers depressed over the election results tuned out, MSNBC has experienced a significant rebound since the president took office last week and could be on its way to regaining its pre-election ratings.
According to Nielsen, the left-leaning cable news network saw a 61 percent increase in weekday primetime viewership since Trump’s inauguration compared to the three weeks prior. During the week of Jan. 20-24, the network attracted 1.3 million total viewers a night versus the previous weeks’ primetime average of 799,000.
With Trump's chaotic “shock and awe” start to his administration — which has featured mass deportations, spending freezes, blanket pardons of insurrectionists, and efforts to upend the Constitution — MSNBC has gotten a major ratings boost from star anchor Rachel Maddow’s return to hosting her 9 p.m. show five nights a week.
Maddow, who pared back to just hosting on Monday nights when she signed a new contract in 2022, is currently scheduled to be on every weeknight through Trump’s first 100 days in office. During her first full week back, her program averaged 1.7 million viewers and topped 2 million on Wednesday – her largest audience since the election.
During her post-inauguration broadcasts, Maddow has been telling her viewers that it would be a mistake to ignore and tune out the Trump administration while simultaneously delivering them hope. “This is a president who is misreading the room, who doesn’t have political capital to burn, and the decisions that he is making right out of the gate are things that are making him weaker and not stronger as he starts to try to govern,” she said on Thursday.
While the network still hasn’t reached its pre-election ratings, the bump around the inauguration helped MSNBC see month-to-month growth in January. Compared to December’s weekday primetime viewership of 660,000, the channel was up 39 percent in January with an audience of 920,000. In total day viewership, MSNBC grew 26 percent with 506,000 daily viewers.
Still, even with the recent ratings boosts MSNBC and CNN have enjoyed in recent weeks – CNN was up 55 percent in primetime compared to December – the two channels have a lot of ground to make up if they want to catch Fox News, which just had the highest rated January ever in cable news history.
With MAGA supporters in a celebratory mood over the president’s return to the White House, Fox News averaged 2.8 million primetime viewers and 1.9 million in total day over the past month, nabbing nearly 70 percent of the overall cable news audience. And despite the month-over-month growth both CNN and MSNBC saw this past month, the networks are still below their 12-month averages, while Fox is up double-digits compared to January 2024.
But post-election downturns are common in the cable news business, and all three major networks suffered temporary slumps depending on who won the presidency. An extended ratings recovery for MSNBC seems to be in the cards, especially if Trump continues to sow chaos and outrage.
“This too shall pass,” former CNN president Jonathan Klein told The Washington Post. “Just in his first week of office, Trump did MSNBC a huge favor by taking his agenda to Defcon 5 quickly and ruthlessly, and that is creating reasons to tune in among progressives but also among middle-of-the-road viewers.”
