A town hall with Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris televised by CNN on Monday drew record viewership for the cable news network, the network said Tuesday.
CNN announced Tuesday that the broadcast was the “most watched cable news single candidate election town hall ever,” according to Nielsen data. The live event averaged 1.957 million viewers, a figure far greater than CNN’s previous four town halls, which attracted an average audience of 1.119 million each, the network said in a statement.
Harris, of California, was widely praised by liberal political commentators for the way she handled questions from Iowa residents one day after formally launching her campaign for the White House. However, she was criticized by conservative pundits for some of the policies she pledged to support, including eliminating private health insurance as part of her push for “Medicare for All.”
“The idea is that everyone gets access to medical care and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through all the paperwork, all of the delay that may require,” Harris said on Monday. “Who of all us have not had that situation where you have to wait for approval and the doctor says, ‘I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this.’ Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”
Harris is a co-signer of the Medicare for All Act authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., himself a potential 2020 contender.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to clarify that CNN’s town hall numbers are the best in network history, not in cable news, as CNN first reported.
