Dem
49
GOP
51
An estimated 58 million people watched the debate on Tuesday. This is 28% more than watched the Trump-Biden debate in June. ABC got 19 million viewers, NBC got 10 million, Fox News got 9 million, MSNBC got 6 million, CBS got 6 million, Fox got 5 million, CNN got 4 million and Fox Business got 295K. These figures don't include streaming or people watching at bars and other locations out of the home. The total number of viewers is estimated at 67 million.
What might be the most important of all these numbers is that 9 million Fox News viewers watched it. It doesn't matter if every man, woman, and nonbinary person in San Francisco watched the debate. There aren't going to be a lot of Trump voters in Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi's home district. But some Fox News fans who watched Trump act anything but presidential may be having second thoughts about him now.
Although more than the Biden-Trump debate got, this is nowhere near a record. The first Trump-Clinton debate in 2016 drew 84 million viewers. The Trump-Biden debates in 2020 averaged 68 million. (V)