The presidential debate of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump toppled the record as the most-watched presidential debate ever.
With 84 million viewers, the showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was the most-watched presidential debate ever in US history.
This was released by the Nielsen company which said that the viewership on over 13 different networks in the United States has toppled a record that had stood for 36 years.
According to the history on US presidential debates, the previous record for presidential debate viewership was between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan where 80.6 million people saw the only debate in 1980.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the US population now is 324 million but during the Carter-Reagan debate, the U.S. population was 226 million.
Since the said debate, no debate had exceeded 70 million viewers.
Aside from TV viewers, Nielsen records showed that there were some 17.1 million Twitter interactions involving 2.7 million people on Monday while the debate was ongoing. When Trump said that he will “absolutely support” Clinton if she is elected president was the moment during the debate that caused more people to pause their television and play back what was said came near the end.
The final results of the debate showed that the audience for Clinton’s first presidential debate will more than double what her husband, former President Bill Clinton, received for his last presidential debate in 1996 which gathered 36.3 million viewers.
In the US, only the Super Bowl conducted annually commands a television audience of that size. The 2015 Super Bowl between New England and Seattle gathered the biggest audience in U.S. television history where 114.4 million people watched.
The said news was particularly good for NBC. Not only did it have more viewers than any other network showing the debate, but “Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt’s reviews as moderator were more positive than Matt Lauer received for his interviews with the candidates at a national security forum earlier this month, or CNBC anchors when they did a GOP debate last fall.
On October 9, the second of three scheduled debates will be held. The “town hall”-style forum will be moderated by Anderson Cooper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC News.
