Back in 2016, Fox News set a debate-viewer record with 23.9 million pairs of eyeballs watching the first Republican primary debate featuring Donald Trump. It was a ratings bonanza for the network and set Trump on a path toward the Republican nomination and eventually the White House.
This year, Fox News once again received the privilege of hosting the first GOP primary debate but the resulting viewership numbers were less than impressive. Just 8 years later, Fox managed to garner half the number of viewers compared to the first event in 2015, a stark reminder of how the network has lost clout this year with casual viewers and Trump voters alike.
As The Hill concludes, this year’s debate was a snooze-fest compared to last time around which likely accounts for the dwindling numbers:
Nearly 13 million people watched the first Republican primary debate on Fox News on Wednesday night, well below the 20 million that tuned into Fox to watch the first GOP primary debate in 2015 — when Donald Trump debuted on the stage.
That 2015 debate was like nothing that had been previously seen on a presidential debate stage before, as Trump, familiar to millions from his years on “The Apprentice,” battled former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and a host of more experienced politicians.
He also memorably clashed with moderator Megyn Kelly, who has since left the network.
The first GOP debate of the 2024 cycle on Wednesday, in comparison, included a number of colorful moments but was a bit more traditional. Without Trump, it did not have the front-runner for the party’s nomination, as the former president is well ahead in most polls.
It’s like attending a concert and the headline act never takes the stage. All you get is the opening acts for two hours and they’re OK, but they’re not who you came to see.
Without Donald Trump, the clear front-runner for the nomination, Fox’s ratings took a serious dive. Few people cared to watch Chris Christie and Nikki Haley argue about why defending Ukraine’s border is more important than defending America’s southern border.
Instead, Trump spent his time sitting down with former Fox host Tucker Carlson at his Bedminster golf club. The resulting interview, which was posted directly to Carlson’s X feed, has, of this moment, garnered some 254 million post views. The eye-popping number is almost unbelievable, and to some extent, it is. Views on X county for a few seconds of time meaning not all of those viewers actually watched the 46-minute interview. Furthermore, the 254 million number is about views of the post containing the video, not the video itself.
For the sake of argument, even if only 10 percent of that number actually watched the entire interview, the number is double what the Fox News debate took in. In reality, the viewership is much higher than that but no one really knows where it would land between 25 million and 254 million.
Some analysts claim the Trump-Tucker interview is lower than that, maybe around the 15 million view mark due to the way X records video views compared to post views, per Mashable:
On X, it’s not entirely clear to most users what the views metric refers to — many people believe, falsely, that the video of Carlson’s Trump interview received 220 million views more than it actually received.
This number shows how many impressions a tweet receives. An impression is counted when a user actively goes to the tweet page or when a tweet appears in a user’s timeline after being retweeted by another user. Views are also counted when a tweet shows up on a user’s timeline via the recommendation algorithm. As such, a single user can be counted multiple times in the view count.
To break down what this means for Tucker Carlson’s Trump interview: The video itself was actually played only 14.8 million times, for at least two seconds of the more than 46-minute interview — or just over six percent of the total 236 million times someone saw the post on X.
Since the Mashable article was published on Thursday, the view count has increased. What Mashable also does not calculate is the number of views outside of the X platform. The interview was quickly shared on other sites such as Rumble and YouTube where it will garner many more views as well, perhaps millions.
From the lowest estimate of 15 million up to somewhere in the 20+ million range, Trump’s interview clearly won the night on Wednesday and continues to drive up numbers as people come back around to watch what they missed.
If you missed either the first GOP debate or the Trump-Tucker interview, they’re both available to watch right here:
