NEW YORK — An estimated 27.3 million people watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on TV, the second-smallest audience for the annual event in at least 30 years, the company Nielsen said on Wednesday.
It was also a nearly 28% drop from the 38.2 million people who saw Biden’s address in 2022.
The only smaller audience since 1993 has been the 26.9 million who watched Biden’s address to Congress in 2021 – not officially a State of the Union address since he had taken office just months earlier. This speech was delivered on an unusually late April 28th.
Nielsen didn’t have numbers prior to President Bill Clinton’s first address to Congress, which reached 66.9 million people in 1993 when entertainment options were fewer.
Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of people who listened to Biden’s speech were aged 55 and older, Nielsen said. Only 5% were young adults under the age of 35.
The speech was broadcast live on 16 television channels.
Biden’s largest audience came on Fox News Channel, where the speech was seen by 4.69 million people, Nielsen said. ABC had 4.41 million viewers for Biden, NBC had 3.78 million, CBS had 3.64 million, MSNBC had 3.55 million, CNN had 2.4 million, and the Fox network had 1.66 million.
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