Here’s some news about last night’s debate that you didn’t hear at last night’s debate — but which may be just as important as what the candidates said. The audience for CNN’s Republican debate, according to Nielsen Fast National ratings, was 23 million viewers. The audience for the earlier debate, between just four candidates, was 6.3 million.
These numbers are comparable to the 24 million who watched the Fox News debate August 6 and the 6.1 million who watched the earlier Fox debate, with seven candidates. Any speculation that Republican voters or those interested in Republican candidates would be less likely to watch the debates on CNN than the debates on Fox News turned out to be ill-founded. Voters who wanted to watch managed to tune in.
Note that this represents a huge increase in the debate audience over previous years. CNN’s highest rated debate before this year, a Democratic debate on January 31, 2008, much later in the election cycle, drew 8.3 million viewers. The CNN audience last night was almost three times as large.
All of which suggests we will see a much larger Republican primary and caucus electorate than in the past. Republican contests attracted 19 million voters in 2012, 21 million in 2008, 17 million in 2000, 14 million in 1996. That’s a very slow-growing electorate. By way of comparison, Democratic contests attracted 37 million voters in 2008. There are no comparable numbers for earlier contests until you get back to 1992: Democratic nominations were uncontested in 2012 and 1996, but 14 million did vote in Democratic contests in 2000, even though Al Gore clinched the nomination after the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. In 1992 there were 20 million voters in Democratic primaries and 12.7 million in Republican primaries, but the numbers are not commensurate: Democrats had a rip-roaring contest that went on for some time, while Pat Buchanan was never able to improve on the 37 percent of the vote he got against George H.W. Bush in New Hampshire.
Will the Republican electorate expand in proportion to this increased debate viewership? We won’t know until we have contests and see how many people vote. Polls are not very useful in projecting turnout; actions, like tuning in a debate, going out to see a candidate speak, etc., probably give a better indication. If the Republican primary electorate does expand, past calculations about the character of the Republican electorate — the proportions of religious and economic conservatives, the proportions of Tea Partiers and moderates — risk being wildly wrong. Obviously Donald Trump’s candidacy is responsible for much of this increase, but note that the audience for the earlier debates was three-quarters the size of CNN’s largest previous audience, held in the midst of a very seriously contested Democratic nomination fight. Something is going on out there — and I suspect it’s not all Trump.
Longtime political operatives don’t like to see new people coming into the process. I remember when I was involved in Michigan Democratic politics in the late 1960s, one old-timer (a very decent person) asked me, “Michael, you know these new people. What do the new people want?” Republican candidates and Republican insiders may be dreading an inrush of new people. Their best move would be to try to learn the answer to the question, “What do the new people want?”
