In a big night for television news, 36.1 million people watched the Tuesday evening coverage of the midterm elections, according to Nielsen.

The spike in viewers — the largest for a midterm in many years — came on a day when turnout soared in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning parts of the country.

The broadcast networks gave an unprecedented amount of prime-time coverage to a midterm election, with ABC, CBS and NBC replacing the usual sitcoms and police procedurals to fill their 8 to 11 p.m. slates with projections and results.

Fox News led all channels with 7.8 million viewers in prime time on Tuesday, according to Nielsen, and it was the first network to call the House of Representatives for the Democrats. That projection came at 9:33 p.m., roughly 50 minutes before any of its competitors made the same call.