President Biden's performance on Tuesday earned him the designation of lowest rated first State of the Union address of the past thirty years. On Tuesday, President Biden delivered the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.
His performance was watched by just over 38 million Americans, giving him the the lowest rating for a president's first State of Union in thirty years, according to Nielsen Research.
Following Biden's address, Nielson released a detailed summary of who tuned in.
According to their research, 38.2 million Americans from 27.4 million households watched on sixteen networks, giving Biden a rating of 22.4.
To put it in perspective, Donald Trump's first official State of the Union address was viewed by 45.5 million Americans, giving him a rating of 26.9.
This was still lower than the viewership of Barack Obama's 2010 address, and lower still than the address given by George W. Bush in 2002, which garnered around 52 million viewers.
As the ABC reports, while Biden did address a joint session of Congress in April 2021, he had not yet served as president for a full year, thus the 2022 address is considered by most to be his first State of the Union. The practice of calling one's second address their first is a relatively new phenomenon, only practiced by the previous seven presidents.
Following Biden's address, Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted an CBS News poll purporting to show that 78 percent of voters approved of his State of the Union messaging.
As the Daily Wirereports, however, Klain failed to divulge that the statistic actually showed the percentage of voters who watched the speech, not voters in general.
Comment: See also: 17 absurd lies Biden told during his State Of The Union speech