On Wednesday, a presidential debate aired with eight of the GOP’s candidates for president… but not frontrunner Donald Trump.
Even without the former president, an estimated 12.8 million people watched the first Republican presidential primary debate on two Fox News television channels and its streaming service.
At the same time as the debate, talk show host Tucker Carlson streamed a pre-taped interview with Trump.
The interview seems not to have pulled many viewers from the debate… but the interview has attracted a different kind of attention.
The 12.8 million viewers make up a little more than half the 24 million people who watched Trump appear in his first presidential debate in August 2015, the Nielsen company said. But it outpaced a January 2016 GOP candidates debate on Fox that Trump also skipped and was seen by 12.5 million people.
The television viewership figure is an estimate of how many people were watching the debate at any given minute. The debate was simulcast on Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network. The debate was also live-streamed on Rumble, but that service doesn’t appear in Nielsen data.
Television is a vastly different world than it was eight years ago, with streaming more established and thousands of cable customers cutting the cord. The most-watched program seen live last week on either broadcast or cable TV was a “60 Minutes” rerun on CBS that reached 5.3 million viewers.
Furthermore, the ongoing presidential campaign is very different than the presidential campaign of eight years ago. The ongoing campaign is shaping up to be a two-horse race between a current occupant and a former occupant. In 2016, the race didn’t even have an incumbent.
While ex-Fox host Carlson boasted Wednesday that his streamed interview would get a “far larger” audience than the televised debate — and Trump claiming that the interview exceeded the Super Bowl in audience — these claims are difficult to check.
In any case, Trump’s interview grabbed more eyeballs than the debate. It was shorter by more than an hour, and it’s available to watch anytime on Twitter.
Twitter said late Thursday afternoon that the tweet of Carlson’s interview show had 236.7 million views. But that’s a count of how many times someone scrolled by Carlson’s interview with Trump in their feeds — even if they didn’t click on it.
If someone happens to scroll past the interview twice, that counts as two views.
In other words, there seemed little evidence that Trump’s attempt to counterprogram the debate, by appearing in an online interview with Tucker Carlson at about the same time on Wednesday, appreciably affected the number of people who were interested in checking out the eight alternatives.
However, Trump’s interview is still flashing across screens. Some viewers, like Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, even watched both the debate and the interview at the same time.
Take a look —
I’m sitting directly behind @RepMTG at the GOP presidential debate and her attention appears to be at least…. divided. pic.twitter.com/KYdJQkBJPx
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 24, 2023
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.