Fox News garnered 12,803,000 viewers Wednesday night during the first Republican primary debate in Milwaukee.

The debate featured eight of the 13 total Republican candidates and was notably missing the front-runner, former President Donald Trump. However, Trump similarly protested the network's 2016 debate in Iowa, which at the time saw fewer viewers than Wednesday night at 12.5 million total viewers.

TOP THREE TAKEAWAYS FROM THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE IN MILWAUKEE

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who was fired earlier this year, hosted a one-on-one interview with Trump at the same time as the debate. It received over 263 million views as of Thursday, with 705,000 likes and over 184,000 shares on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Still, the debate was a boost in viewership for the network, which saw between 2,166,000 viewers and 984,000 viewers during the same time frame last Wednesday. The network normally has anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 viewers within the 25-54 age range, while the debate brought in over 2 million within that demographic.

Fox News remains the No. 1 watched cable news network, with MSNBC in second place and CNN in third. Fox News placed severe restrictions on the rebroadcast of the debate, forbidding any clips accumulating more than three minutes long. As a result, other news outlets simply provided commentary on the debate afterward and kept to their regularly scheduled programming Wednesday night.

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MSNBC had just over 1.7 million viewers in the hours before the debate until its coverage was over. CNN began the night with over 900,000, only to watch viewership decrease to 754,000 as the night went on. After the debate, both networks saw a jump, with MSNBC at 2.1 million total viewers and CNN at an average of 1.2 million total viewers.

The Republican National Committee hosted the event in cooperation with the network, and anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were the debate's moderators. Last week, Baier had over 1.7 million viewers on his program at 6 p.m. MacCallum typically sees slightly fewer, as her program is the 16th most popular on the network.