47.9 million people watched Biden and Trump debate, a steep decline from 2020
The numbers do not come close to some surveys suggesting that approximately 6 in 10 Americans would watch it.
If there’s solace for President Joe Biden after his uneven debate performance last night, it might be that the American people were also not as engaged in the showdown as previous debates.
Biden’s square off with Donald Trump drew 47.9 million viewers on television, CNN announced Friday — a steep decline from the candidates’ first matchup in the 2020 presidential campaign, which was watched by 73 million people across TV networks. The debate sparked a wave of panic throughout the Democratic party after the president spoke with a raspy and sometimes trailing voice, sending the campaign scrambling to calm nerves, reiterate Biden’s case against Trump, and refocus the race on the former president’s misleading statements.
The numbers do not come close to some surveys suggesting that approximately 6 in 10 Americans would watch the match up. Coming early in the summer and amid voters fatigued by another Biden-Trump matchup, the debate also drew a far smaller audience than the all-time record 84 million who tuned into Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time in 2016.
Still, the program represented a coup for CNN, which along with other cable networks has struggled with declining ratings since 2020. The network boasted that the debate is their most watched program in history, eclipsing the previous record, an average of 23.1 million people who watched Trump spar with his fellow Republican candidates in the 2015 Republican presidential primary debate.
It’s also the largest audience on record for CNN on the streaming service Max. The 47.9 million total viewership split among CNN and the 22 different networks which carried a feed of the debate.
Among those, at least 9.53 million people tuned into CNN, 9.3 million watched Fox News, 9.2 million watched ABC News and nearly 4.1 million watched on MSNBC. Of those who tuned into CNN, approximately 3.3 million were in the 25-54 demographic.
Beyond ratings, reviews of CNN’s approach to the debate were largely positive, though some critics disagreed with the moderators’ approach to not fact check the candidates during the debate itself — leaving many of Trump and Biden’s claims uncontested on air. CNN broke from tradition by taking control of the rules, format and distribution of a general election debate, a forum usually hosted by the Commission on Presidential Debates and shared with television networks.
Both Biden and Trump have agreed to participate in a second debate Sept. 10, which will be hosted by ABC. While some Democrats in Congress urged Biden to reconsider attending — at least under the current rules — his team told CNN he still intends to participate.