The ratings are in, even if some election returns are still outstanding. Those seemingly omniscient folks at Nielsen have informed us that some 56.9 million people tuned in to prime-time TV coverage on Election Day, a 20% decrease from 2016. Viewership was down in every age group.
It’s beginning to look a lot like a trend. The Pew Research Center published survey data after the 2016 election detailing how more and more people, especially young ones, rely on digital sources as they follow election returns. “The share of voters who followed returns online increased by 14 percentage points since 2012 (from 34% to 48%),” Pew wrote after the 2016 election.
The research firm has not published a similar comparison for 2020 as of this writing, though there are reasons to assume the share has grown. About 1 in 5 adults say they get their political news chiefly through social media, according to a recent Pew survey. The decrease in TV-watchers on Election Day 2020 doesn’t necessarily mean that people are less interested in what happened. Perhaps they just followed it elsewhere.
Search engines have just made it so easy. Tuning out means avoiding all the TV punditry. Plus: No need for commercials, no need for the civics lessons, no need to wait for the network to cycle through alphabetical lists of candidates. Simply plug in a few key words and in 5 seconds have all the races and vote counts before your eyes.
As an alternative, the social media platforms offer the opportunity to get into the fray, which everyone can appreciate to some degree. You can scroll and learn about Senate races, see how the candidates are doing, even engage in a few back-and-forths, all while still watching Netflix.
