CNN’s first Democratic Presidential debate of the season posted record results versus other party debates of the past -- but less than recent Republican Presidential debates.
The CNN event posted 15.3 million overall viewers, according to Nielsen preliminary live program-plus-same day data -- about 36% less than two recent Republican debates, first on Fox News
and then on CNN, which pulled in 25 million and then 23 million, respectively.
On Tuesday, CNN posted the best cable network results ever for a debate for the Democrats' candidates -- besting
CNN’s January 2008 debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which grabbed 8.3 million viewers. On broadcast TV, the highest-rated Democratic Party's presidential debate came in April
2008 on ABC, which averaged 10.7 million viewers.
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CNN says the debate was the sixth-highest non-sports cable telecast on record.
With regard to social media, Nielsen also said there
was a unique audience on Twitter of 8.9 million. Twitter registered a total of 325.5 million overall impressions coming from 584,000 unique authors and 2.9 million tweets.
CNN says streaming
hit an all-time record for “peak concurrent streams.” At 10:20 p.m., there were 980,000 concurrent streams. This bested the 921,000 number CNN had for the recent GOP debate at Reagan
Library.