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2016 presidential debate breaks ratings record

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2016 presidential debate breaks ratings record

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This article is about how one of the presidential debates in 2016 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton broke the previous record for viewers during the debate.

This will help me in my APUSH paper because it shows how the presidential debates have increased in number and the most recent set of debates has broken the record for most views.

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Monday night was the most-watched debate in American history.

Well over 80 million people tuned in to see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off, setting a new record in the sixty year history of televised presidential debates.

According to Nielsen, the debate averaged a total of 84 million viewers across 13 of the TV channels that carried it live.

Many millions also watched the debate via live streams on the web.

Nielsen's 84 million total counts people who watched via traditional TV channels at home. People who watched the debate at parties, bars, restaurants, and offices were not counted. Neither were C-SPAN viewers.

This means the actual total audience is even higher.

On the TV side, CNN and other cable news channels saw big increases over past election years. So did the broadcast networks.

NBC had the biggest audience overall, partly because "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt was the moderator of the debate. Upwards of 18 million people watched the debate on NBC.

ABC drew 13.5 million viewers, CBS drew 12.1 million, Fox News drew 11.4 million, CNN drew 9.9 million, the Fox broadcast network drew 5.5 million, and MSNBC drew 4.9 million.

The debate was also a hit on Spanish language television, attracting 2.5 million viewers on Univision and 1.8 million on Telemundo.

Trump may have been the ratings magnet, but Clinton may have been the beneficiary of the ratings bump. By Tuesday there was a media consensus that Clinton had prevailed in the debate.

The debate viewership number to beat was 80.6 million, set back in 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan debated just once before the election.

More recently, the first Obama-Romney debate in 2012 averaged 67 million viewers.

Detailed Nielsen data confirms that viewership stayed high the entire time. Contrary to some speculation, there was not a big drop-off after the first 30 minutes of the 98-minute debate.

The vast majority of viewers kept watching until the very end, a fact that the Clinton campaign celebrated on Tuesday.

Earlier story: Ratings expectations for first Trump-Clinton debate are sky high

Anticipation for the Clinton-Trump meeting had been mounting for months. Television industry executives were anticipating a total audience somewhere between 80 and 100 million.

There will be two more debates between the candidates in October.

On Monday night Twitter said the first face-off was the "most tweeted debate ever."

Given the rapid growth of streaming options, it was almost certainly the most streamed debate ever, as well.

Various live streams on YouTube together registered more than 2.5 million simultaneous viewers. Live streams on other sites also reached millions of people.

On both Twitter and Facebook, Trump was a livelier subject than Clinton. Twitter said the "final share of conversation around the candidates on stage" was 62% for Trump and 38% for Clinton.

On Facebook, the results were even more lopsided, with Trump earning 79% share of conversation and Clinton having the remaining 21%.

Being talked about isn't necessarily a good thing for a candidate. Most commentators gave Clinton the edge over Trump after the debate.

Still, the post-debate coverage on TV focused on Trump, partly because of surprising and confounding comments he made on stage.

CNN's reality check team investigated 26 claims made by Clinton and Trump and found that Trump made a greater number of misleading statements.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 27, 2016: 10:26 AM ET

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Debate breaks record as most-watched in U.S. history

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Well over 80 million people tuned in to see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off, setting a new record in the sixty year history of televised presidential debates. According to Nielsen, the debate averaged a total of 84 million viewers across 13 of the TV channels that carried it live.

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This article from the NY Times describes how President Eisenhower used TV ads to beat his opponent in his presidential campaign and he was the first candidate to effectively use the TV for ad campaigns.
This will help me with my APUSH paper because it talks about how even though many were spectacle about the use of ads on TV it worked very well for him and he won the presidency very handily.

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The year 1952 was the first presidential election year in which a sizable number of Americans - an estimated 40 million - owned televisions. Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, one of the architects of the effort to "draft" Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, clearly suspected that TV was going to change everything.

Dewey had dabbled with the medium while running against Harry Truman in 1948, and he realized that making use of it in 1952 would be expensive. Before then, money had not been so decisive in presidential politics. Votes were largely delivered by already existing local party organizations, and there were only so many campaign signs, bumper stickers and buttons you could buy.

In a private meeting, Dewey told his draft-Eisenhower allies, "Don't forget, let's get a hell of a lot of money!" The result was the beginning of the world we know today, where presidential candidates compete to raise billions of dollars that will be spent largely on commercials.

After Eisenhower won the Republican nomination in July 1952, his handlers fretted over his wooden appearances on the stump. The general's friend and adviser Ben Duffy, president of the Madison Avenue firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO), gently explained to him that a TV campaign could convey his warmth and integrity.

As Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates note in "The Spot" (MIT Press, 1984), Ike replied, "You are telling me things I ought to have been told from the start and that nobody told me."

Enter Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates agency, who was reputedly one of the models for the adman Don Draper in AMC's "Mad Men." Over dinner at New York's "21" Club, he pitched his services to the future New York Herald Tribune owner John Hay Whitney and others who were raising millions of dollars for Eisenhower's campaign. To use a term that would have horrified the candidate, he ended up winning the Eisenhower account.

As Reeves recounted to Bill Moyers of PBS in the early 1980s, he considered Eisenhower "a singularly inept speaker," and thus counseled Eisenhower's cronies to forget the existing practice of paying for an hour or half-hour of television time to let the candidate deliver an address. Instead, he advised, the campaign should run brief commercials. He explained, "For a very small sum you get the audience built at huge costs by other people."

When the idea was brought to Eisenhower, he had "great qualms," as John Elliott Jr. of Ogilvy & Mather recalled. Reeves sought to overcome them by reminding Ike that he had not objected to having his speeches televised: "If we cut that speech to one minute, is there anything wrong with that?" The candidate replied, "O.K., let's go ahead."

On Sept. 11, 1952, Eisenhower was driven to Transfilm studios, on West 45th Street in New York, where he worked in secret with Reeves and his crew. The spots, called "Eisenhower Answers America," addressed various political issues - starting with inflation, government corruption and the stalemate in Korea - and were to be broadcast in 12 targeted battleground states late in the campaign. "We thought he would get through four commercials in the day," Reeves later recalled, "and he cut 35 or 40." Production costs were about $60,000 (about $540,000 today).

When the cameras rolled, Eisenhower, wearing makeup, his eyeglasses removed, read from cue cards with huge letters. Seemingly answering voters' questions, his homey responses included, for instance: "My Mamie gets after me about the high cost of living. It's another reason why I say, 'It's time for a change!' "

Later - using a form of deception that would be frowned on today - Reeves and his aides recruited dozens of random Americans who were touring Radio City Music Hall to be filmed and spliced into the spots, which would give the illusion that they were the ones interrogating Eisenhower in person.

When the handlers of Eisenhower's Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, found out what Ike was doing, they thought they had an issue that would give them traction. Stevenson's executive director, George W. Ball, warned reporters that Eisenhower's people were about to merchandise him in TV spots as if he were "soap, ammoniated toothpaste, hair tonic or bubble gum." Stevenson himself declared that Eisenhower's commercials were destined to backfire, adding: "This isn't a soap opera. This isn't Ivory Soap versus Palmolive." (This indignation proved hollow; before the campaign was over, voters would see one-minute Stevenson spots, some with musical jingles.)

Reeves also created the one-minute "The Man From Abilene, " which began with the stentorian narrator noting Eisenhower's rise "out of the heartland of America, out of this small frame house" - followed by a shaky image of G.I.s approaching the Normandy beaches under Nazi fire, while the announcer lauded Eisenhower's leadership during the "crucial hour on historic D-Day."

Walt Disney's brother Roy also produced a commercial, turning the existing slogan "I like Ike" into a catchy song ("Hang out the banner, beat the drum, we'll take Ike to Washington"). Seen in the background of Eisenhower's parade was the shadowy profile of a solitary Stevenson, his nose snobbishly turned up in the air, riding a donkey in the opposite direction. "Let Ad-a-lai go the other way," warbled the chorus. "We'll all go with Ike!"

At first, NBC and CBS, the two dominant networks of the time, felt that such commercial spots were beneath the dignity of a possible president. When they refused to air "Eisenhower Answers America," Ben Duffy, who represented many of their substantial clients, helped persuade them to change their minds. By Election Day 1952, Eisenhower's TV campaign had spent $1 million to $2 million (roughly $9 million to $18 million today).

In retrospect, Ike would have almost certainly defeated Stevenson with the same landslide victory had he never spent a dollar on television. But politicians imitate the successful. In 1960, when about 90 percent of American households had television sets, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon spent heavily on TV commercials, including ones that frankly emulated Eisenhower's small-screen efforts of 1952.

The high cost of paid television is the main reason modern presidential campaigns must raise so much money - a trend that will probably continue until political consultants become convinced that voters are more likely to be influenced by other cheaper methods of communication, like social media.

The irony is that the movement toward TV air wars and the stratospheric fund-raising behind them began with a World War II icon who had felt so conflicted about being marketed. Before Eisenhower finished his day making commercials in September 1952, he was heard to lament the fact that "an old soldier should come to this."

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and "PBS NewsHour." Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: How TV Commercials Made America Like Ike. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Eisenhower, an Unlikely Pioneer of TV Ads

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The year 1952 was the first presidential election year in which a sizable number of Americans - an estimated 40 million - owned televisions. Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, one of the architects of the effort to "draft" Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, clearly suspected that TV was going to change everything.

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This sources gives me the statistics to show which presidential debates has had the most television viewers.
These stats will help me in my APUSH paper because I can justify how the presidential debate has changed with the TV because after the first televised debate, viewers have gone up almost every year since.

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Highest Rated Presidential Debates 1960 To Present

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With the U.S. financial crisis hanging in the balance, the first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain -- originally scheduled for Friday -- has taken on unusual...

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This source shows the amount spent for every presidential campaign over the last 50+  years.
This will help me with my APUSH paper because I am showing that because of the first ad campaign on TV by President Eisenhower, the amount spent on Presidential campaigns has risen. this is due to the fact that many, if not all of the candidates after Ike used the TV to send out messages to the general public about them campaigning

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If you believe the news, campaign spending is: Crazy! Incredible! Out of control! Bizarre and absurd! Record shattering!

Are the sensational headlines true? Are today's election campaigns really spending so much more than campaigns from years past?

The Federal Election Commission maintains detailed campaign financials going back several years, so let's take a look and see whether the data agrees.

The raw figures

Here are the raw spending numbers for both parties' presidential candidates since 1960 (the same numbers as the chart at the top). These figures are not adjusted for inflation.

This next chart shows the average amount spent by Senate and House winners since 1985.

The trend is increasing, but since these numbers do not adjust for inflation, or anything else, the trend doesn't mean a whole lot.
Update: What the 2016 candidates are actually buying with all this money [interactive graphic]
Adjusting for inflation is not enough

When you do account for inflation, the trend is still upward, as shown in this chart from CNN.
This conclusion would be incorrect.
It would be easy to stop here and conclude that campaign spending is higher than ever before.

Here's why.

Population growth and income growth also matter

Not only has the value of a dollar changed over time, the size of the population has also changed.

More people = more donors.

Household incomes have also increased, so the average person spends more today than they did in 1960.

More income to spend = more income to donate.

In the charts below, the campaign spending is normalized to 2014 by adjusting for all three factors: inflation, population, and income/spending ( methods explained below).
Here is how Senate / House spending looks after applying these three adjustments. For House and Senate races, the historical trend is flat.
An apples-to-apples comparison
Here is the presidential campaign spending chart, after applying the same adjustments.
When you remove the effects of inflation, rising population, and rising incomes, House and Senate campaigns are spending about as much today as they did in 1985.

Now looking at the numbers apples-to-apples, you can see one of the biggest spenders was Nixon in 1972.
Between 1960 and 2000, presidential campaign spending actually trends slightly downward.
Nixon also went on to lose his job for raising that money illegally (yes, Watergate was a fundraising scandal). So we should ignore the spike in 1972.

But after 2000, something changed.

Maybe it's not the spending that's out of control

Since 2000, presidential campaign spending has shot through the roof! And these numbers do not even include spending by super PACs, which would make the numbers even more exaggerated.

Why has presidential campaign spending increased by so much in the last 15 years while Senate and Congressional spending has stayed the same?

Maybe it says more about post-9/11 executive power than it does about the rules of campaign finance.

Update:

Here is an updated chart that includes near-final 2016 campaign spending (as of last Monday, 11/7/16).

Methods

To normalize campaign spending figures to the present, I assumed these three indices:

GDP deflator (inflation)

Population

Real GDP per capita (income / spending)

When you multiply them together, the result is just nominal GDP. So ultimately, this is the formula I used:
My latest project, Elementus, aims to bring transparency to the cryptocurrency market. Check out our blog for some crypto-related data visualizations.

2014 Normalized Spend = (Year X Nominal Spend) * (2014 Nominal GDP) / (Year X Nominal GDP)

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Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn339shares If you believe the news, campaign spending is: Crazy! Incredible! Out of control! Bizarre and absurd! Record shattering! Are the sensational headlines true? Are today's election campaigns really spending so much more than campaigns from years past?

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This source allows me to show the amount of TVs per household throughout the years.
This helps me in my APUSH paper because I can compare how many TVs were in American households in any given year and compare that to the number of people watching the presidential debates on TV.

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An educational, fair use website

Bibliographic Entry

Result
(w/surrounding text)

Standardized
Result

Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1996: 798.

"By 1960, there were 52 million sets in American homes, one in almost nine out of ten households."

52,000,000
(1960)

"Television." The World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book Inc., 2003: 119.

"In 1945, there were probably fewer than 10,000 sets in the country. This figure soared to about 6 million in 1950, and to almost 60 million by 1960."

< 10,000 (1945)
6,000,000 (1950)
60,000,000 (1960)

North American TV Market and Its Relevance [pdf]. Energy Star Research, 6 January 2006.

"According to data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), there are currently 285 million televisions in use in US households."

285,000,000
(2006)

"Television." The Encyclopedia Americana. New York: Scholastic Library Publishing, 1984: 433.

"Televisions played a part in the presidential elections in 1948, but its nationwide influence was limited because only 35,000 sets were in use and only 37 stations were on the air."

35,000
(1948)

United States. The CIA World Factbook, 10 May 2007.

"Televisions: 219 million (1997)"

219,000,000
(1997)

Millions of people in America watch television. To be exact, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., an average American watches more than four hours of television a day. This is because television not only offers resourceful and quick information to its viewers, but also a variety of programs that almost anyone can find an interest in.

Over the past years, television has not only been a form of entertainment, but also a form of life. Therefore, it is not surprising that an average household in the United States has more than two television sets, as supported by the Nielsen Media Company in a 2001 research.

Many people across the nation rely on television for information and entertainment as they did many years ago. In 1948, television played a significant role in presidential elections, however, its influence was limited because there were only 35,000 sets with 37 stations at the time.

The American public continues to purchase television sets for their homes. In the year 1945, there were fewer than 10,000 sets in the country. By 1960, there were 52 million sets in American homes, which is one in almost nine out of ten households. This figure soared to 219 million in 1997.

The number of television sets in the United States increases annually, as people stay up to date with events around them. This is why there are currently 285 million televisions in use in US households, according to the data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).

Tamara Tamazashvili -- 2005

Bibliographic Entry

Result
(w/surrounding text)

Standardized
Result

Herr, Norman. Television & Health . Sourcebook for Teaching Science, 20 May 2007.

"Percentage of households that possess at least one television: 99
Number of TV sets in the average U.S. household: 2.24"

249 Million (2007)

Nielsen Reports 1.1% Increase in U.S. Television Households for the 2006-2007 Season. Nielsen Media Research, 23 August 2006.

"The total number of television households within the U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii) is now estimated at 111.4 million"

United States. The CIA World Factbook. 31 May 2007.

"Televisions: 219 million (1997)"

219 Million (1997)

Goldfield, D. Statistical Analysis of the US. 1960: 520.

By Number of Sets:

June 1955

Jan 1958

May 1959

No Set

33

17

14

One Set

65

76

78

Two Sets or More

2

7

8

39 Million (1955)
49 Million (1958)
52 Million (1959)

Households, Families, and Married Couples, 1890-2002. Infoplease, 2002

All households

Date

Number

April 1955

47,874,000

March 1960

52,799,000

Kaufman, Ron. Television's Hidden Agenda. TurnOffYourTV.com, 2004

"The number of television sets in U.S. households in 2001: 248 million"

248 Million (2001)

The television today is arguably one of the most popular home electronic devices. Since it became commercially available in the 1930's, the television has skyrocketed in popularity, with nearly 77% of households owning at least one television set by 1955. Today, the television is almost a necessity, with 99% of households owning at least one set.

In the majority of cases, the television relies on a device called the cathode ray tube, or CRT for short. Inside this CRT, a stream of electrons is focused into a tight beam and then accelerated. This beam is directed at a phosphor coated screen at the other end of the tube, which glows when struck by electrons. However, with only a CRT, the beam cannot be focused, and you would simply get a dot of color. This is why several coils, called steering coils, are wrapped around the CRT. These coils are used to create a magnetic field, which can be used to steer the beam of electrons and create the image you see.

Other types of televisions used today are liquid crystal display TVs and plasma TVs, which both operate in different ways from the CRT. However, the CRT still greatly outnumbers other types of television.

The television is considered by many to be the greatest (or the worst) advancement ever in entertainment. Ever since its introduction, the TV has risen in popularity immensely. Today, very few people are without a set in their own home, and many even have two or more. According to the World Factbook, published by the CIA, there are currently over 219 million TVs in the United States, and that number appears to be getting even bigger in the future.

Adam Lefky -- 2007

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An educational, fair use website Bibliographic Entry Result(w/surrounding text) StandardizedResult Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1996: 798. "By 1960, there were 52 million sets in American homes, one in almost nine out of ten households." 52,000,000(1960) "Television." The World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago: World Book Inc., 2003: 119.