Television ratings for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) address on Tuesday plunged compared to his 2022 speech.
Nielsen data estimates that 27.3 million Americans watched Biden’s SOTU, a 28 percent drop from the 38.2 million who watched in 2022, the Associated Press reported. Biden’s audience was the second smallest in the past 30 years. The only address with lower ratings was Biden’s unofficial SOTU speech in April 2021, a few months after he took office.
An estimated 27.3 million people watched U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, according to Nielsen ratings data from 16 television networks. https://t.co/ZaYLbSpYIC
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) February 9, 2023
Seventy-three percent of SOTU viewers were aged 55 and older, 19 percent were aged 35-54 and only five percent were under age 35, Nielsen found. Adults aged 65 and older watch more cable news than any other demographic, with 32 percent watching it daily, according to Statista figures. (RELATED: Biden, Facing Divided Congress, Pleads Republicans To Work With Him In State Of The Union)
A poll by CNN found 72 percent of Americans reacted positively to Biden’s speech and 41 percent said their reaction was very positive. Biden’s positive reaction was lower than former Presidents Trump, Obama and Bush in the third year of their presidency.
Biden’s largest audience came from Fox News viewers, where 4.69 million people tuned in, followed by ABC News with 4.41 million, NBC with 3.78 million, CBS with 3.64 million, MSNBC with 3.55 million and CNN with 2.4 million. Biden’s speech was carried by 16 television networks.
ABC News had 1.08 million viewers in the 25-54 demographic, the most of any network, followed by NBC with one million, Fox News with 846,000, CBS with 708,000, CNN with 646,000 and MSNBC with 496,000, Deadline reported.
Nielsen’s began collecting data with former President Bill Clinton’s first address to Congress in 1993, which drew 66.9 million viewers.