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Ratings completely tanked during Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address.
It was the lowest-rated first State of the Union address of the past thirty years, according to Nielsen Research.
Nielson released their data:
According to their research, 38.2 million Americans from 27.4 million households watched on sixteen networks, giving Biden a rating of 22.4.
For some perspective, Donald Trump’s first official State of the Union address was viewed by 45.5 million Americans.
This gave Trump a rating of 26.9.
Per @CBSNews poll, 78% of voters approved of @POTUS #SOTU, and a strong majority believe that the President's agenda to attack inflation will work! pic.twitter.com/WJXW2QmwzH
— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) March 2, 2022
More on this story via Post Millennial:
This was still lower than the viewership of Barack Obama’s 2010 address, and lower still than the address given by George W. Bush in 2002, which garnered around 52 million viewers.
As the ABC reports, while Biden did address a joint session of Congress in April 2021, he had not yet served as president for a full year, thus the 2022 address is considered by most to be his first State of the Union. The practice of calling one’s second address their first is a relatively new phenomenon, only practiced by the previous seven presidents.
Following Biden’s address, Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted an CBS News poll purporting to show that 78 percent of voters approved of his State of the Union messaging.
As the Daily Wire reports, however, Klain failed to divulge that the statistic actually showed the percentage of voters who watched the speech, not voters in general.
