Vice President Kamala Harris is often portrayed by fellow Democrats, political pundits, and left-wing accomplices in the media as more popular than President Joe Biden. She is credited with breathing life into a floundering political campaign. Harris’s candidacy is widely believed to have brought an Obama-level energy, a reference to the former president’s campaign in 2008, to Democrats in the 2024 presidential election.
Yet, despite all those accolades and so-called energy, the vice president’s first solo interview last week on MSNBC had lower ratings than an episode of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News.
According to data from Nielsen Media Research, the special edition of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, which aired Harris’s interview with Stephanie Ruhle, had approximately 1.84 million viewers. Comparatively, an episode of The Ingraham Angle, which aired simultaneously, dominated in ratings, amassing 2.27 million viewers.
For the first solo interview of Harris’s campaign to have such paltry numbers should be somewhat concerning. There is really no other way to say this, but it is utterly embarrassing for Harris and MSNBC and nothing short of an example of the continued dominance of Fox News. Nothing against Ingraham or Fox News’s continued dominance in cable news programming, but one would logically think that if Harris is as beloved and popular as Democrats claim that she is, her interview would have had significantly higher ratings. The lack of enthusiasm does appear particularly telling.
But wait, there’s more.
Some recaps of the interview’s ratings tried to spin Harris’s interview on MSNBC as having 3 million total viewers. That resulted from combining the total number of viewers from the interview’s initial airing during the 7 p.m. time slot on Hayes’s show with a repeat airing of the vice president’s interview at 11 p.m. on MSNBC. Yet, even with this fuzzy math, Fox News, taking into account the approximate 1.7 million viewers of Fox News at Night with Trace Gallagher, its corresponding program at 11 p.m., still had much better ratings.
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Furthermore, Fox News also received higher ratings with the much-ballyhooed demographic of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. Ingraham’s program drew 251,000 viewers in this group, while Hayes’s show had just 238,000, according to Nielsen Media Research. Fox News’s advantage with the demographic grew even more with the 11 p.m. slot, with data showing that MSNBC drew 135,000 while Fox dominated again with 310,000 viewers.
It remains uncertain whether Harris is as popular as Democrats claim she is or want her to be. Nevertheless, one thing appears certain: If Harris wants a large audience for her interviews, her advisers should recommend that she start appearing on Fox News instead of being petrified of the network.