Fox News Republican Primary Debate Scores 12.8 Million Viewers, Beats 'Yellowstone' as Year's Biggest Cable TV Network Show

Fox News' presentation Wednesday evening of a spirited Republican primary debate scored an average of 12.8 million viewers, and over 2.8 million watchers in the coveted 25-54 demo, the network announced, citing Nielsen data.

That performance bested all other non-live-sports programming on linear cable or broadcast television this year, including previous leader, Paramount's Yellowstone (11.6 million viewers last season).

Notably, however, the audience was about half the record 24 million viewers who watched Fox News' 2015 Republican primary debate ... the one that featured soon-to-be-president-elect Donald Trump savaging Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and other GOP hopefuls at the time.

MAGA supporters will undoubtedly point to the fact that, this time around, Trump chose to instead appear Wednesday evening on former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson's new Twitter (yeah, OK, "X") talk show, an appearance which has generated nearly 240 million "views" as of the time of this sentence-typing.

So how much of this is a referendum on Trump's remaining star power?

Conversely, Fox's Trump Town Hall presentation back in early June generated disappointing audience ratings. Linear numbers have eroded significantly over the past eight years. And it's really tough to compare a Twitter "view" to a viewer average on linear cable TV.

According to this Twitter FAQ, a "view" can be a lot of different, very unintentional things.

For its part, Fox News is just going to take the win for what was a compelling night of television, regardless of your position on the ideological spectrum.

The ratings performance was better than 70% of primary debates across both political parties the past two election cycles (2016 and 2020), according to Nielsen.