New York Times: For Candidates, Some Benefit by Speaking Early in the Debate

Turns out who gets called on first in a debate does indeed matter.

During the first Republican debate in August, national viewership peaked at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, just a half-hour after the debate started, according to data analyzed by Targeted Victory, a Republican-leaning technology firm.

And in important early-voting states, like New Hampshire and South Carolina, the drop-off from start to finish was even more telling.

“In New Hampshire, if you want to reach a voter, you better have your best message early,” said Michael Beach, a co-founder of Targeted Victory. “By the end of the debate, it was about 40 percent drop off of likely primary-voting Republicans” in the state.

To get this kind of real-time data, Targeted Victory combined information from its voter file with set-top box data collected by Rentrak, a company that tracks viewership, and it found that viewers slowly began tuning out after the first half-hour, giving an advantage to those who spoke early.

This is not to say that candidates have a ton of control over who gets to speak when; obviously that falls to the moderators. But if some candidates seem eager to jump in early, as Senator Rand Paul did in the first debate, audience behavior could be a reason to do so.

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