For Stephen Colbert, the late-night honeymoon appears to be over. But that’s not to say Colbert has disappointed anyone at the Tiffany Network, either, finishing a solid second ahead of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel in both total viewers and the demo in September and much of October. Per The Hollywood Reporter‘s survey of 1000 late-night viewers aged 18-65, only 17 percent of those identified themselves as Republican watch Colbert, while attracting 47 percent of those who identify as Democrats, a 30-point gap. He admitted during his time at the "Daily Show" that he had discovered his liberal politics there, but even some conservatives seemed to respect his brand of comedy, and there was actually relatively little backlash against a guy whose faux conservative alter ego was hardly flattering for the right side of the political spectrum. Compare Colbert’s partisan breakdown with the nearly even splits of Fallon (36 percent Democrat/31 percent Republican) and Kimmel (34/33), and it’s apparent that Colbert’s competitors do the whole broad-appeal thing better than he does. In Fallon’s case, it’s 36-31 Democrats. It’s a smart approach if the goal is to reach as broad as audience as possible, something Colbert never cared to achieve going back to his Comedy Central days and The Colbert Report. It’s important because, even on an average night on CBS, Colbert is playing to a bigger audience (more than 3 million viewers) than he did on his best night on cable (2.5 million for his curtain call last December). Five years later, the late-night landscape is completely different. His competition is almost evenly split in the same poll.
– Ten weeks after his debut as host of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert is falling behind in the late night race, Mediaite reports. And the answer why seems obvious: "Old Comedy Central habits die hard." Colbert is alienating conservative viewers with jokes at the expense of such targets as people who oppose gay marriage or the resettlement of Syrian refugees, according to the Washington Post. A new survey of 1,000 late-night viewers from the Hollywood Reporter found only 17% of people tuning into Colbert are Republicans. And 72% of Colbert viewers say they'd vote for Clinton over Trump. Meanwhile the split between Democrat and Republican is pretty much even among viewers of Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. That could be important for the future of CBS' Late Show because—while it was always getting trounced by NBC and Fallon—it's now being beaten regularly by ABC and Kimmel, Mediaite reports. Colbert is finding a niche in political satire—something both Kimmel and Fallon tend to stay away from—but he's going after Republican targets far more often. While that was expected on Comedy Central, on network TV it has "a result about as predictable as whom and what his political targets will be during each night." According to the Post, Colbert needs to find balance if he's going to succeed on CBS. "Colbert knows how to bring down the house by painting conservatives as a bunch of backward xenophobes," the Post writes. "But huge chunks of the electorate probably won’t be laughing along"