Damn you, baseball, for taking viewers away from the last debate!

Donkeydish.com

I hate to say this, being that we could looking at the most important Presidential election since Pat Paulsen’s first run to the White House in 1968, but the scheduling of the Presidential debates has been a bit sucky. The first debate took place on a Friday night; a time when a good portion of the voting population was out doing other things. The last debate took place on a Tuesday, which seemed okay but probably had some loss of viewers due to ECW on the SciFi Channel.

The final debate on Wednesday? A safe night, sure, if baseball’s National League Championship Series wasn’t airing at the same time and didn’t feature two teams that haven’t been to the Big Show in a number of years. But the NLCS did air and it featured two teams who haven’t been to the World Series for awhile now (by the way…Yay, Phillies!). So, the result of the debate airing on Wednesday night: lower ratings, but not the lowest ratings. With a Nielsen rating of 38.3 the third presidential debate did better than the first (34.7) but worse than the second (42.1).

What’s scary here is the second debate wasn’t even the highest-rated for this Presidential season. That distinction goes to the one and only Vice Presidential debate, which averaged a 45 shaore. This either means people were genuinely interested in seeing what Joe Biden and Sarah Palin had to say or were genuinely interested in seeing a vice-presidential car wreck full of gaffes from both candidates. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say car wreck.

Clacked by Richard Keller
on Oct 16, 2008 @ 16:00 EST5EDT