It seemed clear that on Tuesday evening, Americans would gather in front of their screens to watch the verbal battle between the two candidates for the White House on November 5. Indeed, the bets were not wrong. On Wednesday, the Nielsen meter and the ABC network, which hosted the debate between former Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris (the 35th televised debate in US history) announced that a total of 67,135,000 million viewers watched on television. The debate is
The figure is about average for debates, and means that one in five Americans and just over one in four eligible voters (estimated at almost 245 million) watched the program hosted by Linsey Davis and David Muir from the Constitutional Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It also means that there were many more viewers than in the debate on June 27, in which Trump verbally confronted the current president and then candidate, Joe Biden, and which was so disastrous for the president that it cost him his candidacy, which he withdrew just three weeks later. That debate was followed by 51.26 million viewers (already taking into account the streaming), which is about 15.87 million less than this time; this time it exceeds it by 31%.
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Although the numbers are good, they are not a record. In the 35 debates that have been broadcast on television since 1960, the average audience is about 59 million viewers, so this one surpasses it. In fact, it is very close to the average of the debates between Biden and Trump in 2020, which was just over 68 million viewers. But still very far from the most watched in history: the one that pitted Hillary Clinton against Trump for the first time in 2016, on September 26, which reached no less than 84 million Americans. At that time, the record was held by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 (without the Internet, much less social networks) gathered 80.6 million Americans in front of their screens for an hour and a half.
To calculate the figures, not only ABC’s data was taken into account, but also data from six other networks that used its signal and broadcast it live: CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox Business, Fox News and MSNBC. Of all of them, ABC was the most followed by far, with a total of just over 19 million viewers, followed by NBC (about 9.7 million) and Fox News (8.67). In addition, some 7.4 million viewers watched it through streaming platforms. streaming ABC, along with Hulu and Disney. For the latter, it is the most-watched live event they have ever broadcast. The June debate had as many as nine networks broadcasting it, but the numbers were nowhere near as high as Tuesday’s, the first between Harris and Trump and, for the moment, the only one.
ABC has also broken down some of the data, explaining that some 21 million viewers were adults aged 25 to 54, while another 15 million were aged 18 to 49. In addition, some 7.6 million watched the pre-debate on the same channel and 13.6 million watched the post-debate. Although, as what is counted is the number of devices and the average number of viewers usually in front of them, it does not accurately reflect how many people actually came to watch it in bars, restaurants and parties organised specifically for this purpose.
Although the numbers are huge, they are far from the highest audiences of all time, a record for which was recently broken. Last February, the Super Bowl, in which the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime, became the most watched event in the history of US television. At that time, no less than 202.4 million viewers tuned in at some point to the broadcast, which is the highest number of viewers ever recorded for an event officially televised in the US. The figures for the moon landing, which was broadcast on television in July 1969, are unknown, but it is estimated that between 125 and 150 million people tuned in at that time.
