Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity
Fox News evening hosts Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity have overwhelmingly focused their discussions of key U.S. Senate races on attacking Democratic and independent candidates rather than building up the Republican nominees.
In the five weeks following Labor Day, the names of the Democratic or independent candidates in 10 key Senate races were mentioned 473 times on The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity, compared to only 154 mentions for the GOP nominees — a 3.1-to-1 ratio.
That’s a shift from 2022, when Democratic nominees were mentioned just 1.7 times for every mention of the GOP nominees on the programs of Ingraham, Hannity, and Watters’ predecessor Tucker Carlson, as Media Matters found in reviewing coverage of seven races over the four weeks after Labor Day that year.
This year, Media Matters reviewed episodes of the three Fox programs that aired from September 8 through October 12 for mentions of the names of nominees for Senate in the 10 states identified by The New York Times as “races to watch” as of mid-September: Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.
GOP Senate nominees are also appearing on the Fox programs much less often than they did at this point in the previous midterm campaign, according to Media Matters’ review. The 10 candidates made a total of 7 appearances over the past five weeks (5 by Michigan’s Mike Rogers and 2 by Texas’ Ken Paxton). In 2022, the Republican nominees in the seven races we reviewed made 19 appearances on the programs, averaging nearly 5 such interviews per week.
Fox functions as the communications arm of the GOP, and its biggest stars typically use their programs to achieve Republican electoral victories. This year, much of their coverage has revolved around hagiographic praise of President Donald Trump’s administration and increasingly dire warnings of what will happen to their viewers if Democrats triumph. But the thrust of the MAGA stars’ coverage on individual races appears to align with analysts who suggest the GOP faces a talent deficit after nominating a slate of low-quality candidates in crucial battlegrounds.
Fox's MAGA Propagandists Focused On Michigan, Texas
Michigan’s race was the most-discussed on the three Fox programs, with Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed receiving 253 mentions compared to 57 for Rogers. Texas came in second, with Democrat James Talarico amassing 140 mentions and Paxton receiving 44. Together, those two states accounted for 79% of all Senate candidate mentions for the races we studied. (If anything, these numbers underrepresent the shift, as the methodology does not capture when Fox personalities identify El-Sayed only by his first name or call the Texas Democrat “Talafreako.”)
No other state’s nominees combined received more than 38 total mentions (Alaska). No other individual Republican nominee received more than 27 (Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, compared to 11 for Democrat and former Rep. Mary Peltola). No other individual Democrat had more than 24 (former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, versus just 1 for incumbent Sen. Jon Husted). Maine Sen. Susan Collins was mentioned 13 times, compared to 21 for Democratic challenger Troy Jackson.
The coverage in some states suggests Fox’s stars are resigned to defeat. In Georgia, a state Trump carried in two of his three presidential races, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has been mentioned 14 times, but the name of his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins, seems to not have been mentioned a single time. In North Carolina, which Trump won all three times, former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley have been mentioned 6 times combined.
The Fox fixation on Michigan and Texas matched the right-wing media’s overall focus on viewing the midterm elections through the lens of the culture war, with frequent demagogic attacks on Talarico over gender issues and El-Sayed related to his Muslim faith.
On Monday, for example, Watters responded to the collapse of the right-wing conspiracy theory that Talarico had been off the campaign trail because he had checked into a mental health facility (he and his aides said he had a bad flu) by saying that “Freako” subsequently “slipped on his cowgirl boots” for a Kacey Musgraves show, adding that the candidate “spent the last couple weeks in bed and at concerts thinking about all those trans kids.”
Watters later added that El-Sayed is “infatuated with Sharia law” and said that if he later runs for high office could become “President Abdul Mohamed.” (While Mohamed is El-Sayed’s middle name, Trump has repeatedly used it as the candidate’s first name on the campaign trail, stating that he can call the Democrat “whatever the hell I want.”)
Methodology
Media Matters searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original weekday episodes of Fox News Channel's The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity for any of the terms “Brown,” “Collins,” “Cooper,” “El-Sayed,” “Hinson,” “Husted,” “Jackson,” “Osborn,” “Ossoff,” “Pappas,” “Paxton,” “Peltola,” “Ricketts,” “Rogers,” “Sullivan,” “Sununu,” “Talarico,” “Turek,” or “Whatley” from September 8, 2026, through October 12, 2026.
We then reviewed each mention of any of the above terms for whether they clearly referenced any of the following U.S. Senate candidates: Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Mike Collins (R-GA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Roy Cooper (D-NC), Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), Ashley Hinson (R-IA), Jon Husted (R-OH), Troy Jackson (D-ME), Dan Osborn (I-NE), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Chris Pappas (D-NH), Ken Paxton (R-TX), Mary Peltola (D-AK), Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Mike Rogers (R-MI), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John E. Sununu (R-NH), James Talarico (D-TX), Josh Turek (D-IA), and Michael Whatley (R-NC).
We included instances spoken by anchors, hosts, correspondents, contributors, personalities, or guests who appeared on any of the searched programs. We did not include instances in played clips, read quotes, or live events. We considered each instance of each term as a single mention.
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