Election night used to belong to the big networks. On November 3, a big share of the audience watched returns with creators instead. According to Tubefilter‘s Sam Gutelle, election-related streams on YouTube, Twitch, Kick, and Rumble drew more midterm viewership than those platforms had ever recorded for that kind of night — more than four times the midterm traffic of 2022, across about 3,400 channels.

The story is not that cable disappeared. It is that independent streamers now sit in the same conversation. According to reporting by The Independent‘s Jaspreet Singh, Harshita Mary Varghese, and Aditya Soni, NBC’s nearly 11-hour “Kornacki Cam” still topped the digital board with 29 million views across platforms, while Twitch star Hasan Piker landed second among individual streams.

The numbers creators keep citing

Analytics firm Streams Charts is the common source behind the night’s scorecard. Piker’s November 3 Twitch broadcast peaked at 241,783 concurrent viewers and logged 1.75 million hours watched, The Independent and Tubefilter both report. That put him well ahead of ABC News’ and CBS News’ digital streams on the same night, even as Nielsen still showed traditional primetime TV drawing millions more overall.

NBC’s digital play was the one that beat him. Tubefilter notes that Kornacki’s breakdown collected 29 million views across platforms and that NBC News logged 4.39 million hours of election-night watch time on YouTube. The Independent adds that the Kornacki Cam held a peak of more than 300,000 simultaneous viewers for nearly three hours.

On the right, Steven Crowder’s Rumble stream pulled 461,000 hours watched, Gutelle reports. Candace Owens reached a top concurrent audience of about 70,000, according to The Independent’s Streams Charts figures.

A month of political livestreaming

The spike was not only election night. In the 30 days before the vote, political livestreams logged 10.27 million hours of watch time across more than 2,500 channels, The Independent reports — about 4.5 times the comparable stretch before the 2022 midterms. Piker alone accounted for nearly 45% of that pre-election watch time in the Streams Charts tally the paper cites.

“It’s hard to pick a singular label like 2024’s ‘podcast election’. But if there was one channel that really gained steam this election cycle, it was livestreaming,” Jasmine Enberg, co-founder of creator-economy startup Scalable, told The Independent.

Creators as stop, not just clip

Campaigns treated streamers as destinations. Tubefilter notes that Democratic winners including Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico leaned on social video. California Rep. Ro Khanna joined Piker’s stream and argued colleagues should engage his audience rather than fear it, Gutelle writes.

Speaking to Reuters, Piker said he skipped post-election party events to stay home and analyze the night: “I’m not a campaign surrogate. I’m a political commentator.” The Independent reports the broadcast added about 40,000 Twitch subscribers, pushing him past 95,000.

That reach still comes with friction. Outlets note past controversial remarks that Republicans used in ads and that some Democrats have criticized. Emarketer principal analyst Max Willens told The Independent that streamers are influential enough to become “boogeymen for their opponents,” while stopping short of calling Piker a capital-D Democratic Party leader.

The takeaway

2024 made podcasts a campaign stop. 2026 made livestreams an election-night channel. Creators did not replace Steve Kornacki — they shared the night with him, and in some digital rankings came uncomfortably close. For the creator economy, the midterms were another proof that long, live, personality-driven coverage can compete for the same hours once reserved for cable, as long as the audience already trusts the host.

Image: Livestream setup photo by PTC Productions via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.