The heated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump attracted just under 75 million viewers across linear and streaming — a big jump from the season’s first debate.
Final figures from Nielsen indicate just over 67 million people watched the debate on linear networks.
The Sept. 10, 2024, debate, produced by ABC News and simulcast across most major U.S. networks and cable news channels, outperformed the June 27, 2024, debate between Trump and President Joe Biden by 16 million people.
That’s a 31% jump.
Most U.S. viewers opted to tune in to the host network, with ABC’s network feed attracting around 19 million viewers. NBC came close behind at 10 million, with Fox’s conservative commentary channel scoring 9 million. MSNBC got 6.3 million and CNN scored just under 4.4 million. Spanish simulcasts got 1.16 million on Telemundo and 975,000 on Univision.
The remaining viewership was split among smaller networks.
The figures do not include streaming figures. ABC calculated that almost 7.5 million people streamed the debate on either ABC News Live’s coverage on Hulu, Disney+ and its owned stations’ apps.
Additional streams from ABC News Live on other platforms as well as other network’s streaming services were not immediately available and streamers do not always release viewership figures publicly.