Fox News was the top choice for TV viewers on election night, marking the second straight time the conservative network led rivals in viewership for presidential results.

According to Nielsen data, Fox News averaged 10.3 million viewers from 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, finishing ahead of ABC’s 5.7 million viewers who tuned in for coverage of former President Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

The night was a milestone for MSNBC, which topped CNN on a presidential election night for the first time.

Comcast Corp.-owned MSNBC averaged 6 million viewers, beating CNN’s 5.1 million viewers. Warner Bros. Discovery-owned CNN lost nearly half of the 9.6 million people who watched during the 2020 presidential election.

Overall TV viewing of election coverage was down from 2020. Nielsen said 42.3 million viewers tuned into election coverage across 18 networks measured, dropping 25% from 2020. During that cycle, the outcome wasn’t called for days. Democrat Joe Biden eventually was declared the victor over then-incumbent Trump.

The declines are due to the the audience’s shift away from watching traditional TV, especially among viewers under the age of 50, who have moved to streaming and social media for their news consumption. Cord-cutting has reduced the number of homes that cable news outlets reach.

Fox News coverage anchored by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum was down from its record 13.8 million viewers in 2020, a year when cable news channel viewership reached an all-time high. Even with MSNBC’s improved competitive position, the outlet was down from 7.3 million in 2020.

Broadcast networks were down as well.

NBC averaged 5.5 million viewers, followed by CBS (3.6 million), the Fox broadcast network (2 million), Fox Business Network (897,000) and NewsNation (265,000), which also was carried on the CW Network.

More viewers are streaming election coverage online. Fox News said its digital sites had 47.2 million views between 6 p.m. and 3 a.m. Eastern. MSNBC’s YouTube channel had its strongest day on record with 30 million video views.

MSNBC’s “Kornacki-Cam,” which provided a continuous look at Steve Kornacki’s analysis of the vote, had more than 9 million video starts on YouTube.

President-elect Trump’s historic victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday has surrogates of the Democratic candidate pointing fingers and laying blame for the defeat – even before Harris officially concedes.

Harris-Walz surrogate Lyndi Li spoke to Fox News Senior White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich at Howard University, Harris’ alma mater, in Washington, D.C., saying that the Harris team wasn’t “expecting a blowout at all.”

“The blame game has started,” said Li, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania commissioner.

Li said that Harris’ pick for vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, may not have been the right choice to carry the “blue wall” states against the Trump-Vance ticket.

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“One of the things that are top of mind is the choice of Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate,” Li said. “A lot of people are saying tonight that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Frankly, people have been saying that for months.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is being blamed by one surrogate as a possible factor in Harris’ loss to Trump. (AP/Paul Sancya, File)

“I know a lot of people are probably wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Li continued. “And not only in terms of Pennsylvania. He’s famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned around the state with Harris to shore up support for the Democratic candidate. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images, File)

Li added that she was “not sure how much Tim Walz contributed to the ticket” as the campaign was forced into “cleaning up” the governor’s “laundry list” of gaffes. 

“In the eyes of the American people, he was the governor who oversaw the protests in Minnesota and probably let it go on longer than he should have. So that has been seared in the minds of American people,” she said.

“And also, ideally, you don’t say on national TV that you’re a knucklehead,” Li said, referring to a moment during the Vice Presidential Debate in which Walz was forced to correct a misstatement that he had been in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989. “I just think that’s his very baseline stuff, like politics 101.”

Harris has yet to address the results of the election as of Wednesday morning. She was expected to speak later in the day. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Li noted that Harris’ attempt to present herself as “a unifier” may have “undermined her goal” of getting Biden supporters “who were maybe still understandably upset that their leader was unceremoniously, basically pushed aside.”

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Harris appearance on ABC’s “The View” may also have been a missed opportunity to show how a Harris administration would not have just been a repeat of Biden’s four years, according to Li.

“She knows a mistake was to say on ‘The View’ that she couldn’t think of a single thing that she would do differently from the Biden administration,” Li said. “That was the opener for her to show Americans that she’s going to get tough on the border, that she’s going to take drastic measures to bring down inflation. That was her chance.”

President-elect Trump claimed victory at the Palm Beach Convention Center early Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Li also pointed to concerns about the leadership of Harris’ Pennsylvania team making poor staffing decisions that ultimately led to muddled campaign messaging.

“[Harris] heard us. We raised serious concerns about the Pennsylvania campaign’s leadership,” Li said. “She actually installed someone on her own people in the final weeks of the campaign, but I fear it was too late. …We should have people who deeply understand, intimately understand the contours of the state rather than out-of-state operatives who move from campaign to campaign.”

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Harris did not speak to supporters who gathered at her alma mater overnight. She is expected to speak later Wednesday.

Jon Stewart’s “quick message” to election pollsters was an expletive-laden, scream-filled rant that coincided with the result of President Trump winning reelection on Tuesday.

“The Daily Show” guest host, who will continue to anchor the late-night talk show through 2025, initially directed his ire at pollsters who claimed that the presidential election would be close (among other predictions) and apparently underestimated Trump’s potential comeback. Then he unleashed an NSFW directive (that we will not repeat in this family newspaper).

“I don’t ever wanna f— hear from you again. Ever. I don’t ever wanna hear ‘We’ve corrected for the over-correction.’ You don’t know s— about s—. And I don’t care for you,” the agitated host said during the live election-night special as results came in.

“Here’s what we know: It’s that we don’t really know anything,” Stewart declared. “We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is. And the truth is, we’re not really gonna know s—. And we’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization. We’re all going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be.”

Stewart reiterated that the lessons that pundits take away from these results and the pronouncements they make with certainty “will be wrong.”

The veteran “Daily Show” host, who returned to the Comedy Central desk as interim host in February, looked back at the “post-racial” proclamations ABC News pundit George Stephanopoulos made when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 and Bill O’Reilly’s remarks on Fox News about a GOP pivot on Hispanic voters when Obama was reelected in 2012. Stewart also presented additional proclamations from pundits ushering in a younger, new generation after Trump, then cut to a contradicting clip of then-78-year-old Joe Biden accepting the 2020 election nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Stewart said that “winning message” ultimately led to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the lesson from that — as the pundits framed it at the time — was Trump would be departing the White House as a “pariah” and never be allowed to step foot in the Capitol again. Also wrong.

“My point is this,” Stewart said, launching into a bleeped outcry. “But this isn’t the end. I promise you. This is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

The 15-time Emmy Award winner wasn’t the only TV personality who was shocked on live television Tuesday night. CNN’s Jake Tapper went viral when he uttered “holy smokes” in reaction to an election map that was showing Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, not “over-performing” Biden on John King’s digital map.

“Literally nothing?” the CNN anchor said in disbelief during the live broadcast when the Magic Wall showed a grayed out map. “Literally not one county?”

King, CNN’s national correspondent, had pressed the wrong button and clarified that the map was showing states. He then toggled to another map that showed a few counties where Harris outperformed Biden by 3% or more.

“There might be more out here in the West Coast,” King added. “It’s possible one or two more as they finish the count here. But in the states that matter … in one county in battleground Pennsylvania, she’s outperforming President Biden by 3% or more.”