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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.

I think normies tune in for the first thirty minutes or so.

A single poll before the debate very roughly broke it down into one third of US adults were very/extremely likely to watch live. Slightly more than that were going to watch clips or analysis after the fact. Due to splits in response, this was a bit over half overall of respondents who were very/extremely likely to get some form of debate content, and only a quarter who weren't going to tune in or look after at all.

Anecdotally, even some of the more politically-engaged people I know only tuned in for about 15-20 minutes, in most cases near the beginning, and in many cases a random stretch out of curiosity only. The actual viewership implies that the poll was either a significant over-estimate, or there were a lot of people why couldn't bring themselves to watch despite intending to. Probably the former, this kind of survey is not very accurate for this type of question, in part because the question reveals the simple fact that there is a debate happening! A fact most are only vaguely aware of, much less the exact day. Plus maybe some survey bias and personal overestimation of probability. I'm betting a massive chunk of the viewership were these already extremely-likely people.

I'm not sure what this has to do with me. Normal people don't watch presidential debates (?), therefore... we should debate made-up talking points made up by the politicians?

Normal people don't watch debates, they get their info from people who do. People who watch debates can take all sorts of things from them some of which are the actual policies hit on. It's a very dynamic thing.

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