WWE News: SmackDown Live Ratings down on Election Night

What's the story?

WWE SmackDown Live went head-to-head with coverage for the midterm elections in the U.S and the ratings for the program saw a slight decline.

The show's viewership dropped to one of their lowest numbers of the year but was a far cry from the lowest rated episode of 2018.

In case you didn't know...

The Miz and Daniel Bryan were named co-captains of the SmackDown Men's Survivor Series team at the start of the show and the two eventually booked Jeff Hardy vs. Samoa Joe for the right to join Team SmackDown.

Other key moments of the show were Rey Mysterio vs. Andrade "Cien" Almas, The New Day vs. The Usos and Becky Lynch responding to Ronda Rousey's promo.

The heart of the matter

The Nov. 6 edition of SmackDown averaged 2.08 million viewers and was down 22,000 from the last episode in October.

The last election night that coincided with SmackDown's broadcast took place two years ago for the presidential election on Nov. 6, 2016.

Viewership from the presidential election dropped SmackDown below 2 million viewers, so the midterm election episode maintained much higher viewership.

Ratings for SmackDown have been down compared to last year, but the past few weeks have been especially bad for the show with even SmackDown 1000 only garnering 2.54 million viewers - the highest viewership the program has garnered since April.

What's next?

Next week's episode will be the go-home show for Survivor Series and will be focused on filling the final slots for the Tag Team Division and Women's tag teams.

The past two years have shown that SmackDown does some of their best viewership during WrestleMania season and the end of the year, so this could indicate that the ratings will increase in the next few weeks.