MSNBC’s numbers turned catastrophic after the election.

FOX News Channel (FNC) commanded its highest-share of the cable news audience in network history across total day, holding 62% of the cable news audience during the historic election month, according to data from Nielsen Media Research.

FNC’s audience has risen 24% in primetime compared to year-to-date and the network now holds 73% of the cable news share as CNN (down 39%) and MSNBC (down 52%) have seen their audiences collapse to record lows in primetime.

Lefties appear to be unplugging.

Some inside the network view the decline in ratings as cyclic. After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in November 2020, Fox News — the network most associated with the former president — briefly saw a decline in ratings. In January 2021, Fox attracted a smaller audience throughout the day than both MSNBC and CNN for the first time in 20 years. By the following month, however, Fox was back on top. MSNBC’s audience also declined after Trump’s victory in 2016.

There’s a belief inside MSNBC that exhausted, dispirited viewers will return in droves once Trump is inaugurated in January and begins taking executive orders and other actions. “I’ve heard from so many people that they just can’t watch the news,” one network veteran said. “I don’t want to watch the news. I don’t even want to read it.”

There was a whole lot of drama however after the 2020 election so FOX News viewers remained engage. Something similar happened to Democrats after the 2016 election when they retained viewers by challenging the election. Democrats for the moment are not doing it. The election is not really in dispute and lefties feel dispirited and broken.  Republicans were in a somewhat similar place in 2012.

They may come back once the Left figures out how to brand its resistance, but for the moment the ‘resistance’ is struggling to get off the ground. The 2024 election struck many as a rebuff of everything that lefties had stood for and that the media predicted.