Who’s winning, President Trump or the NFL?

We dove into the numbers to see what's really been going on since quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem in 2016, and since player protests became a political rallying point for President Trump in 2017.

We examined TV viewership for Sunday Night Football in 37 markets in 2016 and 2017. The data, courtesy of Comscore, shows the percent of TVs in a market that were tuned to the big game. Then, we looked at how people in those places voted in the last Presidential election — plus a bunch of football factors.

There was some evidence of a Trump effect. But it was, at best, weak.

What really stood out was that people stuck with football if there was a "football reason" to watch. The data show that quality football and home team loyalty drove the TV audience far more than political tribalism.

As has been well-documented, NFL viewership on TV was down in most places. A little over half of markets we analyzed saw a year-over-year decline in the share of the TV viewers watching Sunday Night Football.

We excluded the local ratings figure from weeks when the home team was on to get a better measurement of broad interest in the NFL.

It's tempting to draw conclusions based on this chart alone. The five biggest ratings dips are in regions Trump won the 2016 vote.

But, that's misleading. With more people cutting the cord, a decrease on its own isn't too surprising. And the big outliers are driven by football reasons.

Trump country had bad football

A flailing home team dampens interest in football in a market, regardless of politics.

Take a look at those five Trump-leaning markets with the worst NFL ratings drops and you'll find bad football.

The worst plunge happened in Phoenix. There, Trump was strong. Cardinals football was not. Fans came into the 2016 season with Super Bowl hopes that never materialized. There was no such delusion in 2017, and the TV audience tanked, falling more than 27% across the area. The Cardinals limped to a .500 record and their second straight season missing the playoffs.

The next biggest drop was in Houston. The region voted Trump in 2016. But the far more likely explanation for the ratings slide is that Houston fans lost interest after superstar J.J. Watt broke his leg Oct. 1, laying waste to the Texans' hopes. The team went from a division winner in 2016 to four wins in 2017.

Indianapolis was similarly snakebit. Andrew Luck missed the entire season due to injury and the team struggled. Ratings were off by 21%.

The other two biggest ratings dives happened in markets without their own NFL teams — and where Trump won the election by double digits. Oklahoma City and Little Rock are Cowboys country. Ratings plunged more than 20%. In 2016, the Cowboys ripped off 11 straight wins. In 2017, they didn't even make the playoffs. Distance didn't help, as those markets saw a far bigger drop than in the Dallas market, down 6%.

Richard Lapchick, Chair of DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida and an expert on the intersection of politics and sport, said the nature of partisanship in those areas may have played a role.

"You have those factors that are hard to figure out exactly — the regional base, the southern nature of Oklahoma City and Little Rock. And Arizona is probably a similar grounding in politics. And of course, not having a good team definitely hurt," he said.

We see football playing a role at the other extreme too, in markets where ratings were up. When the home team's on a good run, we see a TV ratings boost in all games, even when the local team is not on.

The biggest increase among the markets we studied was in Minneapolis. The hometown Vikings ran roughshod over the NFL, clinching a first-round bye in the playoffs for the first time since 2009. Interest in Viking country was high.

The effect was true regardless of politics. Consider New Orleans, where Trump won by double digits. After a humdrum 2016, the Saints saw their football fortunes rise in 2017, winning eight consecutive games and sweeping the division rival Panthers after an 0-2 start. The New Orleans market saw ratings climb 13%.

Indeed, eight of the 12 markets where the home team made the playoffs saw ratings increase year over year. In six of the eight nonplayoff markets with declining ratings, the home team lost at least half of its games.

No politics when home team's on

For most of our analysis, we ignored the ratings for cities when their home team was in the game that Sunday. Why? Because no factor moved the needle more than if the local team was playing. Ratings went up by 16 percentage points, on average.

That trend held in places Trump won big. And it held before and after Trump made it a big issue early in the 2017 season.

Take Green Bay, where the president won nearly 60% of the vote. The Packers were featured in the Sunday night game four times in 2016 on their way to winning the NFC North for the fifth straight year. Those games topped out at a whopping 43.8 rating in the TV market serving Green Bay and Appleton.

Not bad.

In 2017, the Packers were eliminated after week 15. But despite a year that saw the president call for people to tune out the NFL, fans in Wisconsin kept watching. In fact, the Packers' late November game against the Steelers got a 46.2 rating in Green Bay, the highest recorded in any market during the two-year stretch.

That general trend of good home football overcoming politics proved true in market after market, even in the deepest of Trump country. Overall, places where Trump won by double digits had roughly the same decrease as we saw elsewhere.

In the moment impact

If political tribalism was playing a significant role, we’d expect to see ratings take a big hit in early fall 2017. At no time was the spotlight brighter on the NFL protests.

On Sept. 22, Trump told supporters at a rally in Alabama that NFL owners should fire players who took a knee during the national anthem.

Three days later, he followed up with a twitter barrage slamming players, owners and the league about the players' protests against police violence.

On October 8th, Vice President Mike Pence walked out of a game in Indianapolis after members of the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the anthem.

Yet, there’s not much evidence of real-time impact on football viewing.

Again, we excluded the ratings in any market for the weeks when the hometown team was featured in the Sunday night game. We found that NFL ratings dropped slightly from mid September through late October, but at around the same rate as in 2016, regardless of whether the market supported Trump or Clinton or was lukewarm on both.

Lapchick said that finding was especially meaningful.

"It underlines the fact that fans either are coming back or they aren't going away," he said. "Maybe it didn't have as big of an impact as (Trump) said he did."

Perhaps the most telling example of football overwhelming politics is Pittsburgh, where the president won nearly 55% of the vote.

As the president criticized the sport last September, the Steelers organization's reaction became a lightning rod. Amid league-wide demonstrations following Trump's remarks criticizing players who protested, coach Mike Tomlin decided the team would remain in the locker room during the anthem for one game as a show of unity without making a political statement. Some fans still viewed the move as anti-Trump and lambasted the Steelers, some vowing to switch favorite teams or burn their black and gold gear.

Yet, football got more Pittsburghers' eyeballs. TV ratings for Sunday Night Football in the market were up whether the Steelers were playing in the game or not. Their top-rated Sunday night game in 2017 — against the Detroit Lions in late October — rated three points higher in the western Pennsylvania TV market than the Steelers' lone Sunday night game in 2016.

Final ruling: weak influence, erased by football

What happens if we boil this question down to a single number?

Let's again account for the phenomenon of the home team being on, given the massive impact that can have. After we exclude those games, we see that the places Trump won in 2016 indeed saw a Sunday Night Football ratings decline that does not exist in Clinton country. The number is just small.

Places Trump won big — by 10 points or more — saw NFL TV ratings dip less than a single percentage point. That's the same decrease as experienced in markets where neither candidate won by double digits.

Nancy Armour: No need for President Trump to worry: NFL's TV ratings doing just fine

Places Clinton won big also saw a tiny decline. It's worth noting some pretty good football teams were in Clinton country, including three of four teams in last year's conference championship games.

This might be as close as we can get to a clear answer about whether Trump's campaign against player protests influenced NFL TV ratings.

Emily Thorson, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who has researched the intersection of sports and politics, said it's difficult to separate non-football issues — such as politics, concussions, cord-cutting and other unknown factors — from the events on the field. As much as we may want a single explanation, the truth a combination of factors are at play, she said.

The NFL remains the king of TV ratings. All TV programming is taking a ratings hit as cord-cutting consumers switch to streaming services and other digital entertainment options. Yet, NFL games still dominate the list of most-watched shows week after week. The NFL's prime time games on Sunday and Thursday were among the Top 5 shows on TV last year among viewers ages 18-49. And a whopping 37 of the 50 top-rated shows in 2017 were NFL games, Nielsen says.

And, what about NFL ratings so far this year? Ratings are generally up for Sunday games.