As President Obama heads into what promises to be a very tough re-election campaign, the ratings for his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night show that voters’ interest in the President’s message may be on the wane.

In the third State of the Union speech of his first term, the ratings were down 12% from 2011 and 28% from his first speech before a joint session of Congress.

According to Nielsen, Tuesday’s speech averaged 37.7 million viewers, which was down from 42.7 in 2011 and 48 million in 2010.

On the social media front, twitter reported that there were a total of 766,681 tweets for their five official hashtags. The most tweets resulted from Obama’s mention of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, which were mostly positive, and his spilled milk joke, which were overwhelmingly negative.

Twitter also reported that there were a total of 548 tweets from members of Congress, which is remarkably low for such a large group of politicians. Perhaps they were worried about getting caught on television playing with their BlackBerry’s and not giving full attention to the President.

Bill Clinton holds the record for a presidential address with nearly 67 million people tuning in for his first speech before a joint session of Congress on Feb 17, 1993, though it wasn’t officially a State of the Union address.

UPDATE: TVNewser reports that according to a study of the tuning behavior of 100,000 households in the moments leading up to, during and after the State of the Union speech, 27% tuned out after the first five minutes.

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About the author

Don Irvine
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.

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3 Comments for Obama’s SOTU Ratings Continue to Fall

Barb Upstate New York

What’s so surprising. It isn’t a true SOTU address it was Obama in full lying and campaign mode. Same old stuff. He doesn’t care about another soul on this planet. Sorry Michelle…if you got in the way of his delusion…he’d step over even you and the kids. Disgusting how humans can be.

Ted

Dear Upstate Barb:

Do you really think a true scumbag like Lewd Gingrich really cares about you? And aren’t
Gingrich, Santorum and Romney REALLY the persons involved in “full lying” and … REALLY … the “same old stuff”. And … ostensibly as a woman … aren’t YOU “disgusted” by Gingrich’s serial cheating?

If you want to contemplate something truly disgusting … watch any so-called “Republican Debate” … and then think about the fact that the GOP mooks who drove the car into the ditch in the first place now want all of us to take driving lessons from them! Pretty yucking disgusting proposition if you ask me!

Ted Sucks

I think that Ted has some issues, and only one of them is his selective indignation. With regards to Obama, he is always opining on what he thinks Americans believe in, but how would he know? He was raised in Indonesia, he hardly understands anything about what it means to be an American. That’s why his policies are so destructive to both our economy AND our way of life. And Democrats are helping him. The only good thing about the situation is that people can now see what the Democrat party is all about, as if the Democrats history of racism and violence (Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan, enacted Jim Crow legislation, etc.) wasn’t already bad enough. Over the past 60 years Democrats have systematically destroyed the American way of life, and now Obama is here to “fundamentally transform” America. And idiots like Ted are helping him.