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(CNN Business) – Joe Biden’s forum on ABC averaged 14.1 million viewers Thursday night, easily topping Nielsen’s rating for President Trump’s forum on NBC. That alone was a result that virtually no one in the television business expected. And that’s not even the most surprising part.
The Trump forum was simulcast on two of NBC’s cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, but even when those channels are included in the total, Biden, on a single network, still prevailed.
The Trump forum averaged 10.6 million viewers on the NBC broadcast network. On MSNBC, Trump reached 1.74 million viewers, and on CNBC, around 671,000 viewers. So Trump’s gross audience on all three channels was 13.1 million, roughly a million less than Biden’s audience on ABC alone.
ABC News employees privately admitted their surprise when preliminary ratings came in on Friday.
And Biden’s aides wondered if Trump would react angrily.
In the run-up to Thursday night, the Trump campaign embraced the popular ratings narrative and predicted that Trump would surpass Biden. Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller said “we will have a much larger audience than Joe.”
After Nielsen data from Thursday night showed otherwise, Biden’s campaign national press secretary TJ Ducklo, tweeted: «It turns out that last night more people were interested in seeing a leader with a clear plan to control this pandemic and getting Americans back to work, than the same combative and chaotic liar whose incompetence got us into this mess, no matter on how many channels I was”.
Nielsen ratings only measure TV viewership. Both city councils were also streamed live to phones, computers and other devices.
But there is no industry standard to measure all the various ways forums were broadcast. In any case, that would be like trying to combine apples and oranges. In the apple-to-apple pairing between the two candidates, Biden had the best night.
Trump has been an insider on Nielsen for decades. While hosting “The Apprentice” on NBC, he paid close attention to the presentation of his show and routinely exaggerated its success. He has remained obsessed with television ratings during his years in the White House and has frequently congratulated Fox News on its ratings victories.
But when television ratings disappointed him, he switched to other metrics as well; When Biden had a larger television audience for his convention, Trump complained that “online broadcast numbers” were not being counted in the totals.
After Nielsen’s ratings for the forums came out on Friday, Miller retweeted a Trump fan who tried to combine TV and YouTube data to present Trump as the true victor. But that’s apples and oranges again, as one or two minutes of YouTube viewership on demand isn’t comparable to 60 minutes of TV viewership.
Biden’s event actually ran for two hours, including post-forum coverage, while Trump’s event lasted one hour.
Biden’s forum was also scheduled first, the same day Trump pulled out of a scheduled presidential debate. Trump objected to the “virtual” format imposed by the debate committee as a result of his coronavirus infection. So, the Biden campaign agreed to a forum in Philadelphia with ABC, following in the footsteps of Trump, who was on ABC on September 15.
The Trump campaign sought a debate replacement of its own and struck a deal with NBC for a forum in Miami, just as Biden did with NBC on October 5.
NBC’s decision to schedule Trump face-to-face with Biden, at the same 8 p.m. Eastern time, sparked a huge backlash, even within the company.
However, some of the tension at NBC subsided when moderator Savannah Guthrie pressured Trump to respond and rejected some of his misstatements.
While Trump was the runner-up in the ratings race, it is still notable that he reached an audience of 13 million viewers on television, because he generally reaches a much more limited audience during his calls to Fox News and other media outlets aligned.
His time with Guthrie and a group of Florida voters was a rare opportunity for him to speak far beyond his base.
However, the debate that was supposed to take place on Thursday night would have been much more watched. The first debate this fall, and so far unique, was watched by more than 73 million Americans.
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