MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s ratings dropped 43% since Trump’s election day victory

MSNBC star Rachel Maddow has been tuned in by nearly half of her audience since President-elect Donald Trump’s election day victory.

MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” has lost 43% of its total audience in 2024 since Election Day, averaging just 1.4 million viewers since Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

The startling drop comes when we compare The Rachel Maddow Show’s average audience from Jan. 1, 2024, through Election Day to MSNBC’s audience since Nov. 6.

Maddow famously cut “The Rachel Maddow Show” to once a week in 2022 to pursue other projects despite a big payday, and she recently signed a new contract to remain the face of MSNBC for the future predictable.

MSNBC’s biggest star has fared even worse among advertisers’ coveted demographic of adults 25-54, losing 56% of its audience since the election while averaging just 103,000 critical viewers .

“The Rachel Maddow Show” aired weeknights during its heyday, when it often competed for “most-watched cable news anchor,” but Maddow only began hosting Monday nights two years ago and moved to 9 p.m. ET the other four days. week for Alex Wagner. Wagner had her lowest-rated week ever last week.

Maddow is also a mainstay in MSNBC’s coverage of major events, such as Election Night, and hosts podcasts and works on various side projects.

Maddow reportedly earned $30 million a year in her last contract. The new deal, reported by The Ankler, was for $25 million a year over the next five years, but MSNBC insiders have disputed the exact figure.

Fox News contributor Joe Concha, who spent years covering the media industry, said it’s no surprise that a host who “supported Kamala Harris so strongly” is losing viewers at the end of the election.

“What was surprising is that MSNBC gave her $25 million to work one night a week. And the return on investment is that it finishes a distant second behind Sean Hannity at 9 p.m. Was that money well spent? Rhetorical question,” Concha told Fox News Digital.Â

Maddow largely built her program around impassioned criticism of Trump for years and famously pushed since-discredited theories linking him to Russia and fixing the 2016 election. “The Rachel Maddow Show” thrived on the left’s hatred of Trump, averaging 2.5 million viewers in 2017, 2.9 million in 2018, 2.8 million in 2019 and 3.2 million in 2020. In 2021, she returned her workload after a long pause.Â

“The Rachel Maddow Show” averaged 2.4 million Monday night viewers in 2024 until Election Day drove viewers away. Earlier this year, Maddow criticized her network for airing Trump’s victory speech on Super Tuesday and claimed it was “irresponsible to broadcast.”

Maddow also expressed concern before the election that Trump would become a dictator if reawakened.

DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall thinks MSNBC’s choices about Maddow are not “business decisions.”