Record Ratings for Democratic Debate as America Tunes In to 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/media/democratic-debate-nbc-ratings.html

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The viewers have spoken: Ready or not, the next presidential campaign is here.

NBC’s presidential debate in Miami on Thursday — seven months before the Iowa caucuses — broke the record for the biggest television audience for a Democratic primary matchup, a sign of widespread early engagement with the 2020 race.

Nearly 18.1 million Americans watched live on NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo as 10 candidates clashed. The broadcast included a riveting exchange between Senator Kamala Harris of California and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The ratings, released by Nielsen on Friday, beat the 15.5 million viewers who watched the previous record-holder for a Democratic debate, a meeting of five candidates on CNN in October 2015. The audience was also greater than the one for Wednesday’s round of the Miami debate, which featured fewer star politicians and was seen by roughly 15.3 million viewers.

The numbers are a reminder of the power that prime-time television still holds to gather a national audience, even in an age of fractured and niche media platforms. And for Americans barely two and a half years removed from the ubiquity of the 2016 campaign, the ratings may provide the bracing realization that the next contest is already well underway.

“For a large segment of the American public, this was their campaign kickoff,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former producer of presidential debates at NBC News and now the dean of Hofstra University’s school of communication. “This was a broader audience than tunes in for hard-core political programming on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN every night.”

Even NBC News executives, who spent weeks promoting the event, did not anticipate an audience so large.

On the set in Miami this week, network officials took pains to play down expectations, reminding reporters that the debate was taking place in the nascent stages of the race and lacked the celebrity appeal of a candidate like Donald J. Trump, whose participation in the 2015 and 2016 forums sent ratings soaring.

But Mr. Trump’s presidency has galvanized — and polarized — many Americans who once paid only glancing attention to the details of the political world, turning White House advisers into household names and policy matters into fodder for dinner-table conversation.

The Nielsen ratings actually understated Thursday’s overall viewership, because they did not include online video and social media streams.

For the television news business, the high viewership is likely to turbocharge an already significant investment in political coverage, which has pushed up revenues and ratings.

And for candidates in the Democratic field, this week’s numbers will intensify the pressure to perform at their next major televised meeting, a debate in Detroit on July 30 and 31 hosted by CNN.

NBC received mostly praise for its handling of this week’s debates, despite a microphone malfunction on Wednesday that briefly brought the proceedings to a halt. The network’s five-person team of moderators managed to wrangle the unwieldy group of candidates while stepping back to allow more consequential moments, like Ms. Harris’s attack on Mr. Biden, to play out.

Of the 18.1 million who tuned in Thursday, about 10.6 million watched on NBC’s national broadcast affiliates. Another 6.7 million viewed the debate on MSNBC, and about 840,000 watched the Spanish-language broadcast on Telemundo.

Only three presidential primary debates have been seen by more live viewers, all of which featured the 2016 Republican field. The highest-rated primary debate remains a Fox News event in August 2015, which reached 24 million viewers.