The State of the Union address drew a smaller audience than last year’s presidential address to Congress, based on preliminary Nielsen ratings.
President Donald Trump’s 107-minute speech (the longest on record) drew about 27.8 million viewers across the seven most watched broadcast and cable outlets: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, the Fox broadcast network, MS Now and NBC. That’s down by about 12 percent from 31.45 million viewers for those same networks for Trump’s address to Congress last year (which was not technically a State of the Union as it came at the start of a new administration).
Fox News led the way with 9.1 million viewers, well in front of ABC’s 5.1 million. The latter was the top broadcast net for the speech for the sixth straight year, outdrawing NBC (3.6 million), CBS (3.3 million) and the Fox broadcast network (2.1 million). MS Now (2.4 million) beat out CNN (2.2 million).
Fox News also topped the core news demographic of adults 25-54 with 1.47 million such viewers, followed by ABC (1.22 million), NBC (1.02 million) and CBS (815,000). CNN (655,000) moved in front of the Fox broadcast (560,000) and MS Now (323,000) in the demo.
Last year’s address drew a total of 36.63 million viewers across 15 broadcast and cable networks. Final ratings for Tuesday’s address, which will include both additional outlets and Nielsen’s big data measurement, will be out Thursday afternoon. The numbers above may undergo some adjustments in the finals.
A decline for the State of the Union a year after a president takes office is fairly common in recent history. Following their initial addresses to Congress shortly after taking office, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Trump in his first term all drew smaller audiences for the next year’s State of the Union. The exceptions are George W. Bush in 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks, and Joe Biden in 2022, whose first address to Congress came much later than usual (late April 2021) due to health restrictions during the height of the COVID pandemic.