After the release of the official Nielsen Ratings of the two Town Halls, it looks like we are back in the analytical quagmire that we were in prior to the Town Halls. Neither side looks to have received enough of a clean win to declare victory.
As a reminder, we have struggled with our 2020 forecast as so many of our alternative data based indicators point to Trump having a slight electoral advantage while polls clearly show Biden winning in a landslide. We had hoped that the dueling Town Halls would create a situation in which a clear winner would emerge. However, this does not look to be the case.
Each Town Hall could be viewed on TV and on-line. The TV data, based on Nielsen Ratings as supplied via a CNN news article, puts Biden ahead. The on-line data, which is publically available via YouTube, puts Trump ahead.
The number of YouTube views of the NBC / Trump Town Hall on the official channels of NBC News, CNBC, CNBC-TV and Telemundo amounts to 5,438,695 as of writing.
For the ABC /Biden Town Hall, the number of YouTube views on ABC News amounts to 3,064,777.
The CNN article, which has been picked up by many other news organizations, states that the ABC / Biden Town Hall was watched on live TV by 13.9 million while the NBC / Trump Town Hall was watched by 13 million. These articles declare a clean ratings victory for Biden.
However, once you include the on-line views, it looks like Trump pulls ahead.
Doing the math, Trump would be at 18.54 million total views (live TV plus YouTube) versus Biden at 16.96 million.
We believe that Tucker Carlson’s popular 8 – 9 pm show on Fox tended to pull viewers away from the Trump Town Hall. Carlson’s show is currently the most popular cable news show and often pulls in more than 4 million viewers.
This would also explain the unusual Google search activity that occurred at 9 pm, which you can see here:
That late spike higher for Trump Town Hall occurred precisely at 9 pm.
It seems as though some conservative viewers watched Carlson and then searched for the Trump Town Hall at or around 9 pm, and then watched it on YouTube.
Either way, there was no knock-out blow last night.
We continue to believe that this election is tight and that forecasts of a landslide Biden victory are overdone. We further believe that many voters have not yet made up their minds, to actually vote or not to vote or even for whom to vote. This election, like 2016, will likely be determined by a small number of swing states and not by a national landslide.