The numbers were a bracing outcome for the president, whose aides had been promising a decisive ratings win over his Democratic rival. “We’re going to have a much bigger audience than Joe for next Thursday,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, told Fox News last week.
At a rally in Ocala, Fla., on Friday, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Biden was given “easy questions” by ABC and claimed, without basis, that Ms. Guthrie was “not too popular right now.”
“If you can’t handle Savannah, you can’t handle Putin and President Xi and Kim Jong-un,” the president said dismissively, referring to the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea. “That’s small potatoes, last night.”
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign took a victory lap. “Turns out more people last night were interested in watching a leader with a clear plan,” a Biden spokesman, T.J. Ducklo, wrote on Twitter, “regardless of how many channels” Mr. Trump was on.
The Nielsen figures released on Friday included viewers who watched the town halls on television or streamed the event to their TV screens.
With Election Day drawing near, viewer interest in the campaign is on the rise. The audience for Thursday’s telecasts was significantly larger than previous forums: Mr. Biden drew 6.7 million viewers on Oct. 5 on NBC, and Mr. Trump only 3.8 million in mid-September on ABC.
Still, the viewership was magnitudes smaller than the audience that might have tuned in for a formal presidential debate — as had originally been scheduled for the evening.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/business/media/biden-trump-town-hall-ratings.html
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