Even before it happened Sunday night’s Univision debate was considered historic. It was the first time a Presidential debate specifically addressed the fast-growing American Hispanic community.
But now we know it was historic for another reason – the audience. 4.6 million of the nation’s 42 million Hispanics watched the debate, or about one out of every ten Hispanics here in the United States. The average audience for all the Presidential debates this year is 4.3 million. So this debate, targeting an audience that is at most a tenth of the American population, delivered a higher audience than the average of all the other Presidential debates this year.
If the Presidential debates this year had delivered ten percent of the American people as this debate did in the Hispanic community, they would have had audiences of 30 million. So far have delivered 4.3 million. Therefore this Univision debate delivered about 7 times the audience than these other debates did in the broader American population.
We draw two quick conclusions from this.
First, Hispanics are engaged in American politics as never before. The immigration debate of the last several years has woken this community up. Their turnout increased 33 percent from 2002 to 2006; they marched in unprecedented numbers last Spring; citizenship applications are up by at least 61 percent from last year; and now we have these incredible Univision numbers.
Second, it shows the growing cultural and political importance of Spanish-language media. Today a majority of Hispanic adults living in the United States were born outside the US and grew up with Spanish as their primary language. Our estimate is that about half of all Hispanic voters are immigrants, meaning that today at least 4 percent of the American electorate still uses a great deal of Spanish in their daily lives. These demographic trends are behind our recent NPI New Tools paper, “Speak in Spanish,” which you can find here.
Finally, as you consider the import of the historic audience delivered by the Univision debate Sunday night, consider the following facts about the growing power of Spanish-language media, and of course, the immigrant Hispanic community itself:
- The local newscast of Univision, the most watched Spanish-language television network, is the number one local newscast in 16 markets, including Albuquerque, El Paso, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix and San Francisco.
- In the last TV season, Univision beat the 4 major networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – in primetime, in the most coveted demographic, 18-34 year olds, 31 times. In any Spanish-language TV reaches 80% of the Hispanic community.
- In 2006, driven by millions of Spanish-language viewers on Univision, the 2006 the World Cup Final (soccer) drew twice the viewers of the average NBA Finals game.
- Spanish language radio is now the 3rd most listened to radio format in America. A LA-based Spanish-language morning talk show host, El Piolin, has been perhaps the single most important mobilizer of the Hispanic community in recent years.
- Univision’s recent sale price of $11 billion was just a little less than the recent sale prices of Chrysler and the Wall Street Journal combined.
Congratulations to Univision and the University of Miami for making history in more ways than one.