Which is substantially less than in 2004:
According to data from across 11 networks, the first presidential debate on September 26 between John McCain and Barack Obama drew 52.4 million viewers.
The TV audience for the first presidential debate of the 2008 election was roughly 16% smaller than the audience for the first debate between President Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election, which drew 62.5 million viewers on September 30, 2004.
Very odd – we had the two most watched conventions in history, and then debate viewership becomes a dud…what the heck is going on out there? If you look at the history of debate viewership, Friday’s debate doesn’t even make into the top ten – whether you count number of viewers or percentage of households (the number one for each of these is Reagan/Carter and Kennedy/Nixon, respectively). This is a crucial election with a nation at war and in crisis…and people had better things to do with their time on Friday.
I’ve been getting a sensation – there’s no other way to describe it – that people are rather angry at the whole process and about the whole mess in DC. Could it be that people are now tuning out the election and what may have been a high turnout election will end up low turnout? Will anger and Congress’ fiasco turn into a generalized anti-incumbent trend in the voting booth? Do the accepted figures for party ID and likely voter hold any water? Does anyone have a clue about what is going to happen?
I don’t. Heck, I’m not even going to bother trying to guess any more. What will happen, will happen – and I’m just going to do the Christian thing and place my trust in God.
UPDATE: Jay Cost over at Real Clear Politics rushes in where I fear to tread – but, then again, he is generally smarter than me about this stuff:
Immediately prior to the start of the Democratic National Convention, Obama led in the RCP average 45.5% to 43.9%. In June, he had an average lead of 47.1% to 42.4%. So, from June to the beginning of the conventions, McCain whittled down Obama’s lead from 4.5 points to 1.6 points. The Republican National Convention put him ahead of Obama, but recent events have wiped that lead away. Currently, the race stands roughly where it did in June, though McCain is in a slightly better position.
It stands to reason that the financial situation has been a campaign “moment” that has favored Barack Obama. So far, its effect is similar to him winning the nomination in June or heading to Europe in July.
A additional few points are worth noting.
First, the number of undecided voters has increased in the last three weeks, from a low of 6.3% of the electorate on 9/8 to 8.8% last night.
Second, the polls themselves have been very volatile this month. The Gallup tracking poll had a crazy week last week, and individual pollsters are disagreeing with each other quite a bit. Much of the disagreement has to do with McCain’s share of the vote. The standard deviation of McCain’s share in the current RCP average is 2.8%. Obama’s is 2.0%. [The standard deviation is the average distance between an individual poll’s result and the average of all polls.] By comparison, the final RCP average in 2004 had John Kerry’s standard deviation at 1.7% and Bush’s at 1.3%. This is a sign of volatility in the current race. Pollsters are finding fairly divergent results.
Its clear that Obama is currently ahead in the polls – but one, even today, cannot say with certainty who would win if the vote were tomorrow.
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