ICYWW about the ratings race
by digby
Who won the ratings race between the Trump Show and the GOP debates?
Answer: Fox’s debate. But it was the second lowest rated debate of the season. So Trump is certain to take credit for hurting the channel’s total viewership.
Fox News Channel’s Trump-less debate had 12.5 million viewers between 9 and 11 p.m. Eastern, according to Nielsen.
By comparison, two of the cable channels that showed parts of Trump’s event, CNN and MSNBC, had about 2.7 million viewers combined.
So Trump’s rivals clearly came out ahead in the raw ratings.
The most recent GOP debate, televised two weeks ago on the harder-to-find Fox Business Network, had 11 million viewers.
So Thursday’s debate was bigger — but not by much. The other five GOP debates of the cycle have averaged 13.5 million to 25 million.
That’s why Trump can claim victory.
He will claim it of course no matter what the numbers are. And surely Fox has to be disappointed. But what this really may mean is that people are getting sick of the whole show. There’s not much new happening in any of these debates with or without Trump. The format doesn’t really enlighten and after a while it’s just kind of boring. The ratings have been so high so far that probably everyone who might be interested in seeing the candidates have already seen them.
And I think Trump may be about to enter overkill territory too. His stump speech is stale and he hasn’t added anything exciting to it in a while. He’s got good instincts about these things so I’d guess he’s thinking about changing it up.
If I had to guess I’d say he’s looking at a new “law and order” push of some sort. BUt who knows? The way he’s been going on about Cruz being Canadian, maybe he’s going to propose to build his wall around the whole country and put up a blockade along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Would that really be surpising?