President Barack Obama may have been trying to make a case for how better the U.S. is doing under his watch and share his plans for the future, but that’s a challenge if no one is watching. Last night’s State of the Union drew the least number of viewers in 15 years.
Nielsen said late Wednesday that just 31.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the address across all broadcast and cable networks that carried it. According to the Los Angeles Times, that’s down 5 percent from last year’s, when 33.3 million viewers watched.
This is also the lowest viewership for a State of the Union since President Bill Clinton’s last one in 2000, which had 31.5 million viewers.
Nielsen also released stats on the State of the Union’s twitter performance. USA Today reports that the tracking service reported 9.7 million Twitter users were following the speech.
The one moment that really impressed Twitter users was Obama’s joke about how he didn’t have to run a campaign again since he “won both of them.” Within a minute of the joke, there were 44,000 tweets about it.
President Obama’s most-watched State of the Union remains his first, which drew 52.37 million viewers in 2009.
You can read Obama’s State of the Union address here.
image courtesy of Kristin Callahan/ACE/INFphoto.com