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CNN’s town hall with former New Jersey governor Chris Christie drew in the network’s largest audience for the series since the buzzy May town hall with former President Donald Trump.
An audience of 1.35 million people and 239,000 viewers in the key cable demographic adults ages 25-54 tuned in to watch the Anderson Cooper-moderated event with the 2024 Republican presidential candidate, which aired from 8:00 p.m. to 9:35 p.m. on Monday evening, according to Nielsen live-plus-same-day figures.
Though viewership for Christie’s town hall fell short of half of the 3.3 million viewers who watched Trump’s, Monday evening’s event drew in over double the viewers that watched the Mike Pence town hall, which drew an audience of 632,000 total viewers, and over double the viewers that tuned into the event with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, which brought in 562,000 total viewers.
With combined figures for CNN’s digital platforms, which the network reported saw 362,000 live video starts, viewing across CNN platforms totaled to an average audience of 1.36 million.
During the time slot of the town hall, CNN led demo viewership among the cable news channels as the it averaged 239,000 viewers in the demo, ahead of Fox News’ demo viewership of 235,000 and MSNBC’s demo viewership of 223,000.
Monday’s program with Christie marked the fourth candidate town hall of the 2024 presidential election cycle, with previous installments with Trump, Haley and Pence completed throughout May and June.
During the event, Cooper and Christie touched on his stance on gun reform, crime rates and, of course, Trump’s indictment. Christie said Trump’s reelection would be “worse than the original show was.”
“He’s angry and he’s vengeful and he said: ‘I will be your retribution.’ Well, I don’t want him to be my retribution, I don’t need him to do that and I don’t think anyone in America needs it, either. He wants to be retribution for himself,” Christie said. “I am convinced that if he goes back to the White House, that the next four years will just be all about him settling scores with everybody who he thinks wasn’t perfectly nice to him … [He] has shown himself, particularly in his post-presidency, to be completely self-centered, complete self-consumed and doesn’t give a damn about the American people.”
