Opinion: McCain-Obama, Palin-Biden: New numbers reveal Americans eat up these debates

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There’s a lot of talk, mainly between these quadrennial presidential circuses, about Americans’ inattention to and nonchalance about their democratic political process, which now lasts nearly two full years. With the other two spent plotting.

Maybe you remember how impressed everyone was back in August when the Democratic National Convention drew such high TV ratings.

And the very next week, despite a holiday and a hurricane, the Republican National Convention drew even more viewers, especially, doggone it, that acceptance speech by the newcomer Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, whose name is genuine box-office for admirers and detractors.

Now come the presidential debates, which showed Americans by the dozens of millions were watching and judging the contestants to be their new leaders.

And then last week’s record-breaking vice presidential debate between Palin and her Democratic opposite, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. (See a Times video analysis below by clicking on the ‘Read more’ line.)

As Republican John McCain and Democratic Barack Obama prepare for tonight’s second of three rhetorical confrontations -- this one a town-hall forum in Nashville, which the Ticket will again be live-blogging right here as usual at 6 p.m. Pacific -- come some fascinating statistical tidbits that back up the Ticket’s own exploding readership numbers in recent months.

Just under 70 million watched the VP debate, viewer numbers topped only by the October 1980 debate between Pres. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

According to the Nielsen rating service, 61% of all American households have watched one of the debates so far, nearly 31% watched both and fully 41% watched the VP chat.

As usual, older citizens (55+), who are the most reliable voters too, made up the largest proportion for the first two debates -- 42% and 46%. But Nielsen found more younger viewers than usual tuning into the VP confrontation, enough to lower the median age from 54 for the presidential debate to 52 for the VPs.

African American households, which make up about 12% of U.S. TV households, comprised 14% of the Obama-McCain debate audience and about 12% of the VP encounter.

Latinos seem the least interested. They make up about 11% of US total TV households, but made up only 6.3% and 6.5% of the debate audiences.

But here’s one interesting Nielsen finding that flies against all standard political intuitions: Minute-by-minute studies of viewership during both debates so far this general election season show that despite conventional wisdom, viewership did not drop off for the second half of each debate.

In fact, viewership stayed high and steady throughout both sessions.

See what happens without commercials?

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo credits: Associated Press