Republican debate: Presidential candidates tear into absent Donald Trump in Iowa

The final GOP presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses happened Thursday, and, as was repeated ad nauseam, frontrunner Donald Trump chose to hold his own event because he doesn’t like Megyn Kelly and felt her treatment of him in the last Fox News debate was “unfair”.

Updated: Still, the audience for the seventh of the GOP presidential debates was substantially smaller than the August 6 Fox News broadcast, which attracted 24 million viewers, according to the Los Angeles Tines. CNN and MSNBC, both of which carried Trump’s event, combined for less than half that total.

Staying away from the main debate was undoubtedly a risk for Trump, but his supporters feel it was a risk that will pay off in the end. Basically, Colbert played clips of some of Trump’s recent statements and compared them to other statements he’s made in which he’s said the exact opposite thing.

One factor that confounds an easy “viewers didn’t care about Trump” conclusion: By dramatically pulling out, Trump nearly certainly increased viewer awareness of the debate running up to last night.

Google data, however, gave Fox the upper-hand: Search interest for “debate live stream” was 170% higher than searches for “Trump live stream” on Thursday night. Last-minute phone calls with Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes failed to resolve their dispute.

The 7th US Republican presidential debate was nothing short of a circus, although front-runner Donald Trump did not attend the event, says an American political commentator. But ratings experts said Trump did appear to take a chunk out of Fox’s audience.

“I don’t think Ted Cruz has a great chance, he’s a nasty guy, nobody likes him, nobody in Congress likes him”, Donald responded.

Trump seemed a bit hoarse after flying from Iowa to New Hampshire for the speech. That is expected to translate to about 12 million viewers when fuller ratings are released later today.

The other five GOP debates of the primary cycle have ranged from 13.5 million to 25 million. Now, numbers are coming in showing Trump may have wow the PR war even if he lost the ratings battle.