The first Republican debate on Wednesday night drew an audience of 12.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen, indicating strong interest despite the absence of former President Donald J. Trump, front-runner in the race.
The viewership figure, which includes totals from both Fox News (11.1 million viewers) and the Fox Business Network (1.7 million), was far higher than anything else on television on Wednesday night, and outperformed the broadcast network’s combined totals. It was also the year’s most-watched telecast outside of sports, surpassing an episode of Paramount’s “Yellowstone,” which had 8.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
Still, the total audience is a far cry from the record 24 million viewers who tuned in to Fox News for the inaugural Republican debate in the 2016 election cycle, in which Mr. Trump appeared on the debate stage for the first time. Nor did it reach the 18.1 million people who watched one of the early Democratic debates in June 2019.
But the figure still exceeded the expectations of some television executives, who believed the numbers could be lower given Trump’s absence and the lower presence of cable TV in American homes than it was just a few years ago.
Mr. Trump, who had a huge lead in opinion polls and was embroiled in an ongoing feud with Fox, skipped the debate. Instead, he showed up to interview Tucker Carlson — the former primetime star, who was ousted by Fox News this year — on Platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The interview was posted shortly before the debate began on Wednesday night.
Mr. Trump declared his interview with X to be “popular” Thursday morning. But it is not clear how many people watched the interview. Any time users on X scroll a post with a video in their feed, it counts as ‘watched’ – one of the few metrics the social network makes public – whether or not they’ve seen the video. Nielsen TV ratings track more strictly how many people watched the programme.
The Fox News debate featured eight candidates, who often sparred violently with each other. They are Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum.
Fox News’ moderators, Bret Baer and Martha McCallum, spent about 10 minutes questioning Mr. Trump and the four criminal indictments against him, with Mr. Baer saying he had to admit to “the elephant that isn’t in the room.”
The next Republican debate is scheduled for September 27 on Fox Business Channel.