Trump-Biden CNN Debate Brings in Over 20 Million Fewer Viewers Than 2020 Debate

For anyone who spent a millisecond on social media during Thursday night’s presidential debate, it certainly felt like everyone was watching the event.

The 99-minute CNN production pitted incumbent President Joe Biden against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump.

It was, in short, a debacle for Biden.

It was the sort of nuclear disaster that has the Democrats scrambling to play damage control — to varying levels of delusion.

But while the “results” of the debate were clear to see for anyone with a lick of intellectual honesty, just how many people actually did tune in to see the bloodbath?

According to The Hollywood Reporter, tens of millions of people tuned in to watch Trump verbally joust with Biden, but not nearly as many as the last time the two squared off.

Citing Nielsen Data, the Reporter noted that the CNN-produced debate — which was also restrictively offered across 16 other networks — averaged a still-impressive 51.27 million viewers.

And while many wayward, modern shows would yearn for 50 million viewers, in terms of presidential debate standards, Thursday night’s viewership fell well short of the previous standard set by Trump and Biden.

The inaugural 2020 presidential debate, this one with the roles of Biden and Trump flipped in terms of incumbency, drew an eye-watering average of 73.13 million viewers.

That’s a sharp 30 percent decline in viewership.

Broken down, CNN led the pack by drawing 9.53 million viewers.

Right behind CNN was Fox News, which drew 9.28 million viewers.

In third was ABC, which garnered 9.21 million viewers.

(CNN also said that another 2.36 million viewers watched the debate via digital platforms, including 864,000 viewers on streaming platform Max.)

It goes without saying that, for Democrats at least, fewer eyes on the Thursday night debate was ultimately a good thing.

Compared to their 2020 debate, 30 percent fewer people saw Trump bludgeon Biden at the debate podiums. That’s a win — sort of.

But dampened expectations aside, what does this lessened viewership actually mean?

While it could mean any number of things, two likely scenarios stick out:

1. Far more people have made up their minds heading into the 2024 presidential election than in 2020. Whether that’s good news or bad news for Biden remains to be seen (it’s probably bad), but if people have already decided who they will be voting for regardless of debate performance, why watch?
2. People are truly and fully fed up with the establishment media, and can you blame them? Trust in the establishment media was already cratering before the COVID pandemic, and that’s only been followed by four years of shameless gaslighting from legacy news outlets. Given that, why bother giving a network like CNN the time of day?
3. It could be a combination of the above two scenarios.

Whatever the reasons, the debate was an abject step backward for Biden’s re-election bid.

The glass-half-full approach for Team Biden is, uh, that fewer people watched this debate than the last one.

The glass-half-empty approach for Team Biden? It’s already over, the people have made up their minds in late June, and no amount of establishment media spin will work.