Smaller crowd
About 65 million people tuned in for Monday’s presidential debate, down from 84 million people who watched the first2016 debate.
About 65 million people tuned in for the first general election debate of the 2020 presidential campaign cycle Tuesday night.
That preliminary audience number, based on eight networks that carried it, was down significantly from the record 84 million people who watched the first debate of the 2016 general election campaign live across 13 television networks. About 67 million people watched the first debate of the 2012 general election campaign between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
The tally, which comes from Nielsen data, excludes debate viewers who streamed online. It represents the best estimate of how much audience interest there was in the 90-minute event.
With an average 17 million total viewers, Fox News had the largest audience share, likely driven by enthusiasm for the president, whose supporters gravitate toward the cable-news network. That figure was ahead of second-place ABC, a broadcast network, with about 12 million total viewers, and NBC, which averaged 9.3 million total viewers.
Among the other cable news networks, CNN averaged 7.9 million total viewers, while MSNBC averaged nearly 7 million total viewers.
Tuesday night’s debate, which was widely considered to be one of the most unpleasant to watch in television history, may have turned off some viewers as President Donald Trump continually interrupted former vice president Joe Biden and the experienced moderator, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.
Wallace pleaded repeatedly with the debaters to give him back control of the event, to no avail, and the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Wednesday that the format will change for the remaining presidential debates — which many expect will involve granting the next moderators, Steve Scully of C- SPAN and Kristen Welker of NBC News, the power to cut the microphones of misbehaving participants.