Election Night Sent Viewers Back to the News, and Back to Broadcast, New Madhive Data Shows
New research from Madhive shows where audiences actually went when the results came in on Tuesday, Nov. 3
Few places spend election night watching the screens more closely than the Washington region, home to many of the consultants, agencies, public affairs teams and media buyers behind the country's campaigns. New research from Madhive, an advertising platform built for local performance, shows where audiences actually went when the results came in on Tuesday, Nov. 3: to the news, to broadcast and local stations, and to every screen in the house.
The data comes from Maverick AI, Madhive's local intelligence layer, which draws on a smart-TV panel in prime time on election night, along with web, app and streaming activity, compared with the same hours on normal Tuesdays.
- From 8 p.m. to midnight ET, one of every two minutes of TV viewing on Election Night was news, compared with about one in seven on a normal Tuesday. At 10 p.m. ET, more than half of TVs in use were tuned to news, four times the usual share.
- The bigger shift was where people watched. Broadcast and local stations carried 48% of election-night news viewing, up from 29% on a normal Tuesday, while cable news fell from 55% to 41%.
- Spanish-language TV's share of news viewing nearly doubled, to 7.6% from about 4%, and in California nearly one in four minutes of news viewing was in Spanish.
The state-level picture tracked the races.
- Texas tuned in hardest, with 63 in 100 TVs in use on election news in prime time, more than double a normal Tuesday.
- Iowa's news audience grew 3.5X, more than any other state, on a night when its Senate race settled control of the Senate.
- In Maine, half of the TVs still on at 12:30 a.m. were on election news, five times a normal Tuesday, ahead of a Senate call at 1:02 a.m. ET.
It wasn't just TV.
- Between 7 p.m. and midnight, 43 in 100 household connections active on phones and computers visited a news site or app, nearly double the 24 in 100 a week earlier, and election and politics pages drew 5.7X the visits.
- At midnight, streaming news was on 16 in 100 active streaming-TV connections, more than double a week earlier.
- On Wednesday morning, 41 in 100 active household internet connections were back on the news, half again as many as the Wednesday before.
For Mid-Atlantic agencies and communicators, election night offered a lesson that will outlast the 2026 cycle: when the moment matters, audiences still turn to local broadcast first, and they bring their phones, laptops and streaming apps with them.
