This maneuver would change the tide of the election, the Democrats thought. Americans would see how terrible Donald Trump and Republicans are, they hoped. For some reason, Democrats were banking on voters turning on their favorite leftwing news channel to witness the farcical proceedings while simultaneously forgetting about the calamitous governance of Joe Biden. It didn’t work, and the viewership ratings for Thursday night show just how mistaken the Democrats were.
According to an analysis by Newsbusters:
“Based on the most recent ratings data, January 6 hearing coverage on broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) drew significantly smaller audiences than those networks’ own evening newscasts generally do on a standard weekday. Evening newscast audiences on any given night last week were 1.6 times larger than the total number of broadcast viewers who tuned into the hearings on Thursday.
[The] hearings averaged just 3.63 million watchers across all three broadcast networks. ABC won the ratings battle with 4.35 million viewers, followed by NBC with 3.31 million. CBS was a close third 3.24 million viewers.
Contrast the above ratings with those for the same networks’ evening newscasts for the week of June 1, which averaged 5.92 million viewers per evening.”
As bad as those numbers look, in reality, they are even worse. Newsbusters’ examination compares the viewership of the Democrats’ dog-and-pony show to “evening newscast audiences.” But the networks’ nightly newscasts generally occur between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM, depending on the time zone. That’s not primetime, and, by definition, primetime typically has even higher ratings.
No matter how we slice the data, and regardless of how we dissect the corpse of the Democrats’ sideshow, Thursday’s ratings results for the Congressional hearings were pathetic.
Is this the Democratic Party’s last gasp? Will their sinking ship finally submerge on its way to the ocean floor? Probably not, because Democrats are utterly desperate. There will be more hearings this week, though none will be in primetime, and after Thursday’s ratings fiasco, they may never get that privilege again.
But Democrats must try and distract Americans with January 6th, or gun control, or an imaginary crisis of white supremacy because that’s all they’ve got. They can’t run on foreign policy because voters will be reminded of the botchery of Afghanistan and Ukraine. They can’t run on national security because they’ve opened up our southern border for troublemakers to pour through. And they can’t run on the most important issue – the economy – because it’s in shambles and Biden and Democrats are to blame. So distractions like January 6th are all they have left.
