A Media Research Center study has put a stark number on late-night television’s focus during the U.S. Senate contests it examined. Of 52 jokes about Senate races, 45 targeted Republican candidates, accounting for 87% of the total.

The tally covered jokes aired from Sept. 8 through Friday across four broadcast and cable programs. They were Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

The NY Post reported the findings exclusively after receiving the study from the Media Research Center. The numbers presented a lopsided picture, with barely seven jokes directed at a Democratic candidate during the period that researchers tracked.

That split left Republican candidates absorbing nearly all the ridicule identified in the study. The report also detailed which candidates received some of the heaviest attention from the late-night programs.

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Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton drew 14 wisecracks, the highest specific total listed in the report. Paxton is running against Democratic state Representative James Talarico for the U.S. Senate.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was another prominent target in the study’s breakdown. Nine jokes slammed Collins as she tries to fend off Democratic challenger Troy Jackson.

Michigan Republican Mike Rogers was targeted six times, according to the study. Rogers is running for an open Senate seat against far-left Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

Together, those examples showed that the focus was not confined to a single candidate or contest. The study highlighted Republican candidates in Texas, Maine, and Michigan as repeated subjects across the programs it monitored.

The scope of the research was limited to jokes about Senate candidates, leaving other political figures outside the tally. That exclusion included gags aimed at President Donald Trump.

Trump was a ceaseless target of late-night television jokes, send-ups, and scarcely disguised innuendo. None of that material was included in the 52-joke count focused on Senate races.

Media Research Center President David Bozell expressed no surprise at either the study’s overall result or its anti Republican tilt. His response focused on how repetitive the selection of political punchlines has become across late-night comedy.

“Late-night comedy has become remarkably predictable,” he said.

Bozell argued that repeatedly targeting the same group while largely sparing another eventually becomes more notable than the comedy itself. “When the same people are always the punchline, and the same people are almost never the punchline, eventually the pattern becomes funnier than the jokes.”

He also called for a broader approach to political humor rather than keeping one side largely beyond the reach of the punchline. “Comedy is sharpest when nobody is off limits.”

Bozell ended his response with a blunt suggestion for the programs covered by the research. “Late night should try it.”

The report’s central contrast could hardly have been clearer: 45 jokes at the expense of Republicans and only seven knocking Democrats. That gap formed the basis for the study’s finding that 87% of the Senate candidate jokes it tracked went after Republicans.

The individual counts added further detail to that imbalance. Paxton’s 14 jokes, Collins’ nine, and Rogers’ six made the three Republican candidates specifically identified in the report recurring subjects of the monitored shows.

The findings covered four major late-night programs, each known in the report solely through the material counted during the stated tracking period. The study did not provide a broader count of every political joke aired by those programs.

It instead concentrated on jokes involving candidates in high-stakes Senate contests. Within that defined group, Republicans were overwhelmingly more likely than Democrats to end up as the target.

For Bozell, the issue was not that politicians had become punchlines. His criticism centered on the predictability created when the same political side repeatedly bears the joke while the other side almost never does.

The study’s figures offered the pattern in numerical form, and Bozell supplied the cutting review. Across 52 jokes involving Senate candidates, the late-night lineup directed 45 at Republicans, leaving Democrats with only a small share of the mockery.

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