More than 55 million Americans tuned in this past January to see the Baltimore Ravens muster just one touchdown against the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2024 AFC Championship Gam. Even more watched Donald Trump erroneously claim that immigrants eat pets in his presidential debate versus Kamala Harris on Tuesday night.
According to Nielsen, 67.1 million people watched the debate across all networks, making it the most-watched U.S. TV broadcast of the past four years other than the four Super Bowls. The big game still blows everything else out of the water—the least-watched Super Bowl of the past four, 2021’s Buccaneers-Chiefs blowout, drew just under 100 million pairs of eyeballs. This year’s Chiefs-49ers overtime thriller was the most-watched TV program in official ratings history with 123.7 million viewers.
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The Trump-Harris debate, though, beat out both the AFC and NFC Championship Games. The former was the most-watched in history while the latter, at 56.7 million viewers, ranked just behind 2010’s Vikings-Saints classic.
Prospective voters were more interested in this new matchup than the one on June 27 between Trump and Joe Biden, which got just 51.3 million viewers and was a catalyst for Biden dropping out of the race in July. That showdown between a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, however, was still able to outdraw Patrick Mahomes versus Josh Allen in the AFC Divisional Round (50.3 million).
In a way, Trump is the Dallas Cowboys of the political arena. The Cowboys usually rank among the highest-rated NFL regular season games each year, and Trump has been a part of three of the four most-watched debates of the past half-century. His first debate with Biden in 2020 slotted in at 73.1 million. In 2016, his first debate with Hillary Clinton posted a record 84 million viewers and the third drew 71.6 million.
The 2020 numbers were achieved despite competition with the NFL, specifically a Monday Night Football game between the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints during the first debate and a Sunday Night Football battle between the New York Giants and Green Bay Packers during the second. This year, though, neither Tuesday’s debate nor the scheduled Oct. 1 vice presidential debate will clash with America’s favorite sport.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t like,” Trump said in 2016 of the debate schedule, “It’s against two NFL games.”
The NFL has fully taken over the airwaves in recent years, notching 93 of the 100 most-watched U.S. TV broadcasts in 2023. The first entry on the list that wasn’t an NFL game was Biden’s State of the Union address at No. 21.
NFL advisor Marc Ganis recently said on Sporticast that someone who works at the league told him “we still have slots to fill” on the top 100 list. Presidential election programming, however, seems to be the one thing that reliably eats into football’s giant slice of the pie. In 2020, four of the top seven most-watched TV shows were politics-related.
Chances are that the top 100 list at the end of 2024 will look more like that version than last year’s—though it remains unclear if Trump and Harris will face off again before Election Day, with nothing agreed on for a second debate.
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