Many in the sports industry were already bracing for a likely fourth-quarter ratings hit due to the upcoming U.S. presidential election. But the ongoing reformation of the all-important political race now threatens to amplify that expectation and reshape the landscape for multiple sports leagues and television networks. 

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to not accept the Democratic Party nomination and withdraw his bid for reelection, announced Sunday afternoon, quickly led to networks shifting several sports events from broadcast channels to cable and online platforms—including NASCAR’s Brickyard 400, the NFL’s Flag Championships, the LPGA’s Dana Open, and The Basketball Tournament—to allow for breaking news coverage. 

But the still-volatile nature of the presidential election and sharply divided nature of the U.S. electorate suggests more sports programming shifts and ratings hits to come. The Democrats, though rapidly lining up behind Vice President Kamala Harris, have yet to make a formal nomination, and the party’s convention isn’t until Aug. 19–22 in Chicago. 

Lessons From the Past

The 2016 election, the last presidential contest not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, is instructive. NFL ratings that season fell 8% from the prior year, with the decrease particularly concentrated in the first half of the regular season and before the election that year. 

“It’s an encouraging rebound,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said that December as ratings bounced back somewhat post-election. “I think it proves that the election was certainly a factor.”

MLB’s two League Championship Series that year were also down by double-digit percentages before the league ultimately hit the jackpot with a World Series win for the Cubs that was the team’s first since 1908. The Cubs’ seven-game victory over Cleveland marked the best World Series viewership in more than a decade, and hasn’t been approached since, further serving as an outlier.

The NFL has a particularly lofty perch from which to fall, as its 2023 season delivered across-the-board viewership increases, including a 7% boost in the regular season to an average of 17.9 million viewers per game. That was the league’s best mark since ’15—the year before that ’16 election. 

Big Dollars 

Despite the potential viewership attrition to not only football and postseason baseball but early-season basketball and hockey and postseason soccer, the political race also promises to be a sales boon for many networks with sports content.

Harris and the Democratic Party raised $100 million in online donations in the 24 hours after Biden’s decision to withdraw, marking the single-largest fundraising day of this election cycle for the ActBlue organization. That adds to the $96 million that Biden previously raised and banked. Republican nominee Donald Trump has $128 million in cash on hand. 

A meaningful portion of that money is set to be spent on TV advertising in sports, as the genre has no equal in reaching mass audiences. In 2023, 93 of the top 100 programs in U.S. television, regardless of genre, were NFL game broadcasts.

Max Verstappen (above) is in a bit of a slump. The three-time world champion has failed to win each of the last three races, and he showed his frustrations with his Red Bull team on the team radio over its strategy that led to a fifth-place finish in Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix.

He’s still in pole position to win the drivers’ championship for the fourth year in a row—the gap between Verstappen and second-place Lando Norris is 76 points, which is larger than Norris’s lead over eighth-place George Russell—but his safety net is getting smaller. Verstappen won an F1 record 19 of 22 races last season, and he carried over his dominance into this year by winning four of the first five races. But since the Miami GP in May, Verstappen has won only three of eight.

Verstappen’s precarious perch could actually be a positive sign for F1 viewership in the U.S., which has plateaued over the last year. The racing series averaged 554,000 viewers on ESPN networks in 2018, the year before Netflix dropped the docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive. By ’22, F1 doubled its viewership, averaging a record 1.21 million viewers across ESPN networks while debuting the Miami GP on ABC that same year.

Last season saw F1 take a slight step back in viewership, with ESPN reporting an average of 1.11 million viewers, a 9% decline versus 2022, despite the addition of the Las Vegas GP, a third race in the U.S. Viewership waned toward the latter half of the season as Verstappen’s dominance made races predictable, especially as he clinched the drivers’ championship with five races left on the calendar, including two in the U.S.

Verstappen’s dominance may not be the only culprit for the declining audience. Netflix reported a double-digit drop in viewership for Drive to Survive, a possible sign of viewership fatigue. The second half of the F1 season, when most of the viewership dip occurred, also coincides with the return of major U.S. sports leagues like the NFL, NBA, and NHL.

In 2024, the average viewership for F1 races is at 1.34 million, down slightly from 1.36 million at this point last year (not including the Hungarian GP). But races that Verstappen did not win, such as the Miami GP, the first career win of Norris, and the British GP, the first win of legendary driver Lewis Hamilton since ’21, both set viewership records. 

There are still 11 races in the 2024 F1 calendar, and with McLaren coming off an impressive 1–2 finish in Hungary to trim Verstappen and Red Bull’s lead in the constructors’ championship, the back half of the season is set to be a lot more competitive than last year. It will be fascinating to see whether the competition will drive fans back to Formula One.