The 2024 State of the Union address drew a larger TV audience than the 2023 address.
President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress averaged 32.23 million viewers across 14 broadcast and cable outlets, almost 5 million more viewers than the 2023 State of the Union. Viewership rose on all of the largest outlets as Biden’s address grew by about 18 percent.
The vast majority of viewers — 28.47 million — watched the State of the Union on the big four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and the three largest cable news outlets (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC). All seven outlets drew a bigger audience than they did for last year’s address.
Fox News led all outlets with 5.84 million viewers for Biden’s speech, beating out the 5.24 million for ABC, which had the biggest tune-in among the broadcast networks. NBC’s 4.47 million viewers finished third, followed by MSNBC (4.43 million, its biggest audience ever for a State of the Union), CBS (4.09 million), CNN (2.63 million) and the Fox broadcast network (1.77 million).
Univision (970,000 viewers) fell a little from 1.08 million for last year’s State of the Union, while Telemundo (900,000) gained 64,000 viewers, bringing the total for the address 30.34 million. The averages for both Spanish-language networks encompass pre- and post-speech analysis and the Republican response. The remaining 1.89 million viewers viewers came via CNNe, Fox Business, Newsmax, NewsNation and PBS.
Even without factoring in other broadcast and cable channels, the audience on the seven biggest networks surpassed the all-network total of 27.31 million viewers last year. Thursday’s speech was the second largest address to Congress of Biden’s term, behind the 38.2 million who watched the 2022 State of the Union.
NBC had the most viewers in the core news demographic of adults 25-54 with 1.18 million, just ahead of the 1.14 million for Fox News and 1.07 million for ABC. CBS averaged 824,000 viewers in 25-54 demo, followed by CNN (710,000), MSNBC (695,000) and Fox’s broadcast coverage (517,000).
This doesn’t count the many people who watched via streaming and later on Youtube. So, quite a few people saw Biden’s bravura performance.
Now I’m sure someone will find a way to say this is bad news for Joe Biden but in reality I’d imagine that the low bar the right wing (with the help of the media) has set for Biden ended up helping Biden by making more people tune in to see if he would drool on his tie and fall down the stairs. And he most assuredly did not do that.
It was nice of Trump to eschew his usual red, white and blue patriot ensemble for the sake of his honored guest.
In case you were wondering if all this dictator talk is just liberal hysteria, I give you exhibit A:
Trump on Hungary’s autocratic PM Viktor Orban: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban…He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it…He’s the boss.”pic.twitter.com/5lU60bYEfu
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 9, 2024
Listen to the difference between Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s natural voice and her speech voice. Britt delivered the Republican Party response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address last night. pic.twitter.com/uUN89QX774
You know what No Labels is. Digby’s been shouting it. But they are stuck with no serious candidate yet still hope to keep the spoiler train roling. Without the spoiling.
The contents of the call offered nothing to dispel this fear. The call consisted of No Labels party members from numerous states, each reporting on what members in their states and regions were thinking and feeling. While many of these local leaders said there’s a lot of enthusiasm for a No Labels run, some of them reported that members are wary of functioning as a spoiler.
For instance, a No Labels leader in Idaho said that while members are all for run, they believe the ticket should “only” be offered to a candidate who has a “reasonable path to succeed and not be a spoiler.” A leader in Iowa said the candidate must be “strong” and have “the ability to win.”
They don’t know what they want but they want it now. Somehow.
What was striking about this call was how deeply a lot of these party members have bought into No Labels’ hype. One leader after another repeated, almost robotically, the idea that a No Labels candidacy would be a true act of heroism that could only rescue the country from the alleged horrors of having to choose between Biden and Trump.
I don’t know what they’re smoking, but it’s not your grandfather’s weed.
Biden, of course, has at times governed in a bipartisan way—which No Labels says it prizes. And there’s a vast asymmetry at play here, in which Trump poses a severe threat to our democracy and our country, and one major party is his willing accomplice in this regard, even as Biden and Democrats pose no such threat.
But No Labels simply refuses to accept this basic state of affairs. And there was no sense on the call that party members have seriously grappled with what it means that one side poses that dire threat while the other does not, or whether that creates an obligation for No Labels to be particularly cautious in proceeding. Instead, there was a lot of self-congratulatory talk about the group’s own bravery.
And you thought MAGA was the only political cult loose in the land. What do you call a personality cult in search of a personality?
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
Watch the following if you have time. It is utterly inspiring. We used to talk a lot about ecology but I feel as if it’s slipped down the list of priorities as we face other environmental challenges. This story is such a perfect lesson in how we humans screw everything up and how nature, left alone, can heal itself.
In 1995, 14 wolves were released in Yellowstone National Park. No one expected the miracle that the wolves would bring
Lara Trump nomination: In a world where qualifications are often measured by titles and years of experience, we’re reminded of a truth: God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called. Lara Trump is the embodiment of this truth pic.twitter.com/gnFK5Mjt2E
They all robotically acceded to Trump’s order to install his hand-picked sycophant and his daughter-in-law so they will help pay his legal bills. And they’ll take millions in small donations from brainwashed Americans who can’t afford it. I’d feel sorry for them if they didn’t support that orange fascist which is inexcusable.
The Republican National Committee on Friday selected new leaders who were handpicked by former President Donald J. Trump, a move expected to tighten the expected nominee’s hold on the party’s machinery ahead of the general election.
The committee unanimously elected Michael Whatley, who led the North Carolina Republican Party and was the R.N.C.’s general counsel, as its chair and Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, as co-chair.
Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump were endorsed by Mr. Trump last month after Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, privately told the former president she planned to leave the position. Ms. McDaniel was for months the focus of intense pressure from inside and outside the Trump campaign to step down over the committee’s lackluster fund-raising and criticism over Republicans’ performance in 2022.
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies also criticized Ms. McDaniel, whom Mr. Trump originally picked for the position, for being insufficiently supportive of the former president. They cited her neutrality during the Republican primary and her resistance to his push to call off a series of debates that he refused to participate in.
The new leaders will take the reins of the national party at a critical juncture for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and their elevation is part of his larger effort to effectively merge the R.N.C. with his campaign.
After Mr. Trump dominated the primaries on Super Tuesday, his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, exited the Republican race, effectively handing him the party’s nomination. Mr. Trump is now focused on the general election, and his campaign is expected to begin raising money in concert with the party, allowing him to raise far larger sums and to tap into the existing party apparatus.
During Friday’s meeting, the R.N.C. voted to officially recognize him as the party’s presidential candidate, even though he has not yet locked up the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination.
In a speech after his election, Mr. Whatley vowed that the committee would “be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump,” flip control of the Senate and expand Republicans’ slim majority in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Whatley also said his priorities as chair would be “getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.” He pledged to build on the committee’s efforts to recruit and deploy poll watchers, workers and judges to serve as “real-time monitors” as votes are being cast as well as counted.
Mr. Trump — who continues to make false claims about voter fraud as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — has told allies that he believes the R.N.C. needed to spend more money on “election integrity” efforts.
Mr. Whatley has backed Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has asserted, without basis, that Republican efforts in North Carolina prevented Democrats from cheating Mr. Trump out of victory there in 2020. In a statement, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee criticized Mr. Whatley as a “fringe election denier.”
On Friday, he said that the committee would “work relentlessly in every state to ensure that it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Mr. Trump has frequently and falsely contended on the campaign trail that Democrats pervasively cheat during elections.
Description of writer Evan Osnos' recent interview with Biden. Watch til the end. Either I'm totally high or this is disturbing shit. Both can't be true. Okay, I guess both can be true. pic.twitter.com/rHLiAP9nRk
He still plays the January 6th choir before his rallies. And he’s played the J6 footage too. But nothing beats this particular moment and while I know the general public maybe not be aware of the astonishing, symbolism of what he did that day, there is no excuse for the media to cover this race without keeping this in the back of their minds when they play the shallow horse race game and pile on Joe Biden over trivialities. They live in the country too and they know what this man is. They are abdicating their duty to inform.
Sen Schatz is correct
the moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party, when described by journalists accurately, sounds (to Republicans and some others) unfair even though it's not
JV Last says we shouldn’t be surprised by Biden’s performance last night because he’s actually good at this stuff. And he is. But for some reason people always forget that until he does it again. Anyway, Last has an interesting observation about the campaign that I think is correct:
But I’m not here to sell t-shirts. I’m here to point out one of the fundamental asymmetries that was on display last night and how it’s going to drive this campaign.
Donald Trump is a dominance politician. His mode of operation is to bully and intimidate. He is bad at making deals. (Shocking, I know.) He is personally offended by people who do not prostrate themselves to him. He has no interest in legislating and no policy goals he seeks to achieve. His theory of the 2024 election is that he will drive the turnout of his base—primarily rural white men without college degrees who do not often vote—to such a degree that their numbers swamp an average Democratic turnout and the turnout of frequent-voting independents.
Trump is interested in capitulation, not persuasion.
What you saw from Biden last night was the polar opposite in both temperament and strategy.
Biden is a back-slapper. He works well with his political opponents. He likes people—even people who aren’t on his side. He’s good at compromise and has real-world bills he wants to pass.
Biden is a politician and a persuader. That is fundamentally who he is and this fact informs his strategy. Biden is not banking on turning out 110 percent of Democratic voting benchmarks. He is not looking to bring in low-propensity voters who normally have little interest in politics.
His goal is to let Trump take care of Democratic turnout while he peels off 10 percent of self-identifies Republican voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and then wins the double-doubter independents decisively.
Which is what he took aim at last night. On policy, he did this by hitting Ukraine, Roe, and immigration—three areas in which he’s where the majority is on policy. But he also did it with his mien. Did you catch how feisty Biden was? He enjoyed it when Republicans booed him—and I mean that he enjoyed it in the way that a guy who thinks there’s supposed to be give-and-take likes to spar.
But maybe the most telling moment of the entire evening was Biden’s reaction to MTG’s wardrobe choice as he made his way through the chamber
MTG confronted Biden in full MAGA regalia and imagined that she was doing something disrespectful and transgressive—that she was going to show him that she was unafraid of his socialist crime family or whatever.
And Biden loved it! He was clearly tickled, like he thought that this Jewish Space Laser CrossFit lady wasn’t an enemy to be crushed, but just a wacky part of life’s rich pageant.
Last night was a clear view into the choice this campaign will present voters: An angry strong man who dominates and fights or a happy politician who persuades, cajoles, and compromises. Which of them will be the best steward of a strong American economy?
That is a campaign Joe Biden can win.
I don’t know if Last is right about Biden’s strategy but he is certainly right about who Biden is although Biden is going to have to cut through a lot of bullshit punditry. The right predictably said Biden was angry and divisive, apparently not realizing that they were undercutting their own characterization of him as a doddering dementia patient. And there were members of the media (Gloria Borger, I’m looking at you) who said that he was “too angry.” But I think most people watching the speech saw a fired up Joe Biden who was, as Last says, a confident politician in full control who was enjoying the fray. Some people might call that a “happy warrior” and right now that’s just what the doctor ordered.
A GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that Britt’s delivery quickly became a gossip item Thursday night among operatives connected to Donald Trump—something that could have potential implications for her consideration as a vice presidential pick on the 2024 ticket.
“Everyone’s fucking losing it,” this Republican said, requesting anonymity to discuss private conversations. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”
“No one was surprised that [Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s handpicked senator resonated so poorly with the base,” said a source close to Trump, who requested anonymity for similar reasons. (Britt is a favorite of McConnell, which has made Trumpworld suspicious.)
“But her performance was the stuff of nightmares and people were surprised by that,” they continued.
This Republican said it is still unknown how the performance will affect Britt’s VP stock, but noted that Trump definitely watched the coverage of it and it “isn’t going to help.”
Several popular social media influencers in the MAGA camp also panned the speech; the account Catturd tweeted Britt was “awful” to his 2.4 million followers.
[…]
Britt went for a dramatic performance with her State of the Union rebuttal, casting Biden as a failed president and arguing that the GOP was the best option for regular working families.
But the senator’s delivery turned out to be so dramatic that it ended up being distracting at best and disingenuous at worst.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator, posted on X Friday morning that Britt had genuine appeal in coming across like “the moms at the school drop off” and praised the kitchen setting.
“But the delivery was parody-level terrible, and I promise that didn’t sway any of those suburban moms we’re trying to reach,” Stuckey wrote.
The good news for Bobby Jindahl and Marco Rubio is that they can rest easy knowing they are no longer the winners of the worst State of the Union responses of all time. We have a new champion.
Everyone was expecting a historic train wreck of a State of the Union last night and they got it. But it wasn’t the one they thought it would be. Biden’s address was powerful and dynamic and no doubt put a lot of timorous Democrats’ worries to rest (at least for a day or so.) It was Trump’s highly touted response that failed dramatically.
Biden came out swinging and knocked the Republicans so far back on their heels that they had to completely abandon the image of him they’ve been building since 2020 — that he’s so old and feeble that he can’t even feed himself — and instead whimper like a bunch of little old ladies that he offensively aggressive. And they whined mightily that Biden was too “political” apparently forgetting that in his last State of the Union speech, Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Freedom on far-right, hate radio star Rush Limbaugh calling him “a special man, beloved by millions of Americans” and thanking him for “decades of devotion to our country.”
Biden gave a barn burner of a speech that wasn’t boring, which is highly unusual for any president but especially unusual for a president many people have been convinced has one foot in the grave. As it turned out, what actually died last night was Trump’s Truth Social media platform on which Trump had flamboyantly promised to do “play by play” of Biden’s address. The site went down for many people all over the country before Biden even reached the podium leaving us with only these important insights:
We were all waiting on tenterhooks for over an hour to read what he had to say about Biden’s choice of socks until the site came back up to reveal that Trump had pretty much just been ranting about Biden coughing and warning people not to shake his hand because it has germs. And he also lied and lied and lied about his own record, obviously unnerved by Biden’s very pointed criticism, especially in the very strong opening section of the speech, when the audience is biggest and most attentive, in which Biden strongly contrasted his record against his predecessor.
Starting off with foreign policy he made a compelling case for support for Ukraine and went after Trump (without ever using his name) for his Putin toadying, particularly the asinine comment that he’d tell him “do whatever the hell you want” to any NATO country that doesn’t “pay its bills.” He said , “a former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.” Republicans all sat glumly silent, obviously terrified to cross their Dear Leader, as he railed on Truth Social, “he said I bowed down to the Russian Leader. He gave them everything, including Ukraine. I took away Nord Stream 2, he gave it to them! He was a Puppet for Putin and Xi, and virtually every other Leader!” It appears that criticism hit a nerve, maybe because it’s true.
The president admonished the Republicans to their faces for January 6th as well saying “my predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.” Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting behind the president on the podium looked as if someone had just rubbed a grapefruit in his face.
And he took on the conservative Supreme Court Justices, some of whom were sitting in front of him as he excoriated the assaults on reproductive rights. He reminded them of the passage in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade which said “women are not without electoral or political power” and then added, “you’re about to find out.” He asked the Republicans in the chamber, “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” and he blamed Donald Trump,right upfront, pointing out that Trump brags about overturning Roe.
And much to my happy surprise, he went after Trump for his greatest failure, and one of our country’s worst tragedies, which for some reason people have flushed down the memory hole — the horrible response to the pandemic and the carnage he left in his wake:
“Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate. A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any President owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable.”
He did not care. He was worried about “his numbers” going up.
That opening salvo was impressive and Biden didn’t lose any steam for the rest of the speech as he laid out the differences between his agenda and his opponent’s, talked about his accomplishments and plans for the future. He announced a new plan for humanitarian aid to Gaza and while he reiterated his support for Israel he also said, “To the leadership of Israel I say this. Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority. As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution.” If you want to know the prospects for any Republican president agreeing with that, all you have to do is look at the sour look on every one of their faces as they sat on their hands when he said that.
It wasn’t all aggressive rhetoric, he also went off script and confidently jousted with the Republicans on various topics (although he unfortunately used the ugly term “illegals” in a back and forth with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.) He even managed to trap the GOP in the same trap he laid last year on cutting Social Security, this time on corporate tax cuts:
— Brad Batt for TN State House ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾 (@bradbatt) March 8, 2024
It was one of his best speeches and delivered with a vigor that puts Donald Trump’s recent rambling low energy rallies to shame.
If you were a person who only saw the headlines of the major papers or watched Fox News over the past year or so, you didn’t recognize the president last night, that “elderly man with good intentions and a bad memory” as Special Prosecutor Robert Hur so snidely put it. It was Joe Biden, the same guy that 81 million people voted for three and half years ago. He’s fine. Now maybe we can start talking about something other than his age?
