Democrats were promising that the prime-time TV extravaganza presented by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2020 riot at the Capitol last Thursday would be “must-see TV.”
Apparently, most Americans decided it was “must miss.” The Nielsen ratings for that night are out, and it appears that the audience for the event was smaller than for a Young Sheldon rerun episode that CBS ran in the same time period the previous week.
The audience for the “Capitol Assault Hearings” was about the same size as nightly news broadcasts last week, according to the ratings. Nearly every major news network and the Big Three of CBS, NBC, and ABC covered the hearings.
Just 3.24 million people watched the network’s “Capitol Assault Hearings” coverage Thursday night, according to the TV Ratings Guide. Exactly one week prior, 3.86 million people tuned into CBS to watch a Young Sheldon rerun, meaning an old episode of the coming-of-age sitcom garnered roughly 600,000 more viewers than the inaugural hearing.
That gap is even more pronounced for new Young Sheldon episodes. More than seven million people, for example, watched the show’s season five finale, titled “A Clogged Pore, a Little Spanish, and the Future,” during CBS’s 8 p.m. slot on Thursday, May 19. Three weeks earlier, 6.9 million people watched a new episode titled, “Uncle Sheldon and a Hormonal Firecracker.”
In fact, the Democrats’ delusional thinking that blasting Donald Trump and the Republicans for election denial was more important than inflation, the infant formula crisis, or any other of the half dozen crises that Joe Biden caused and refuses to deal with will cost them their majorities in November.
Republicans pointed to that announcement Friday morning to argue that Democrats are not prioritizing issues that are important to voters. Google trend data show midterm voters have “very low interest” in the January 6 riots compared to issues including jobs, taxes, and inflation, according to Axios.
“While President Biden and Nancy Pelosi are detached from reality and focused on their political smokescreen January 6 hearings, Kansas families are struggling just to make ends meet each day as they deal with a level of inflation many of them have never seen in their lifetimes,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) said in a statement. “I call on Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats to hold a prime-time hearing on the out-of-control inflation their policies have created,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy added in a Friday morning tweet.
McCarthy points to the real reason Democrats are trying to shift the public’s focus to a riot that happened nearly two years ago. Talking about real issues is impossible for them given how badly Joe Biden has botched everything he’s touched. The pandemic, Afghanistan, supply chain problems made worse, rising interest rates, and more. Above all of it, the stealth tax of inflation is robbing families of their future.
The J6 hearings are all the Democrats have and their only chance to salvage anything from the midterms. That chance — never more than wishful thinking — has proven to be a phantom will-o’-the-wisp that will be gone before the leaves turn.
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