Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Donald Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Hillary Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

When voters were asked to write in their “main source” for election news, four-in-ten Trump voters named Fox News. The next most-common main source among Trump voters, CNN, was named by only 8% of his voters. Clinton voters, however, did not coalesce around any one source. CNN was named more than any other, but at 18% had nowhere near the dominance that Fox News had among Trump voters. Instead, the choices of Clinton voters were more spread out. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were all named by between 5% and 9% of her voters. What’s more, though Fox News tops the list of sources among Trump voters, only 3% of Clinton voters named it as their main source.