TV Ratings: Republican Primary Debate Down, Still Leads Primetime

The second debate of the Republican presidential primary didn’t draw quite as big an audience as the first.

Wednesday’s event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library drew a combined 9.5 million viewers across Fox News, Fox Business, Univision and Fox digital platforms. That’s down about 27 percent from the 13 million who watched the first primary debate on Aug. 23.

Fox News had the largest portion of the audience with 6.69 million viewers, while Fox Business brought in 1.82 million — its most watched telecast since 2016 — and Univision had 813,000. Streaming accounted for the remaining 200,000 viewers, similar to the first debate.

Across all three linear channels, the two-hour debate averaged 1.89 million viewers in the key news demographic of adults 25-54.

As was the case in August, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, former president Donald Trump, didn’t participate in the debate. Seven other candidates did take part (and took a few shots at Trump for not attending).

The debate drew the largest primetime audience on all of linear TV Wednesday, outpacing the season finale of America’s Got Talent on NBC (5.36 million viewers) and the season premiere of Survivor on CBS (5.24 million).

The first two Republican primary debates have averaged 11.25 million viewers across all platforms — a little less than half the total through the first two debates of the 2016 GOP primary (23.5 million), the last time there was a big field of candidates for the party. In the 2020 campaign cycle, the first two Democratic primary debates averaged 13.2 million TV viewers (over four nights, as the large field of candidates was split in two each time).