GOP presidential debate on CNN was longest on record — by far
Immediately after a marathon three-plus hour Republican debate, a weary Donald Trump told CNN the event was "too long." He also insisted, in typical Trump superlatives, that the debate must have been the longest ever.
Fact check: Trump was right.
More than 34,000 words were spoken in Wednesday night's debate — more than any other televised presidential debate on record, according to a Paste BN review of 119 debate transcripts maintained by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
That's about 12,000 more than the next-longest debate, a 10-way contest in New Hampshire during the Republican primary in 2007, and about 16,000 more words than the August GOP debate in Cleveland.
(Word counts are approximate, and include introductions and transcript notations. But they exclude commercial breaks, allowing for a more accurate comparison among debates.)
The 11 candidates on stage, and CNN's expected high ratings, were undoubtedly factors. But longer debates also seem to be a trend.
The first modern television debate, between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, was less than 11,000 words. The 10 longest debates — all more than 20,000 words — have all happened since 2007.
By elapsed time, Wednesday night's debate in California began at 5 p.m. local time and ended after 8 p.m. — 11 p.m. on the East Coast.
Even before the debate, Trump complained that CNN was "milking" the debate. "Too long, too many people on stage!" he tweeted.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday, Trump said CNN extended the length of the debate because the network knew he'd generate ratings:
Well, I guess they looked at the ratings and somehow they figured out I get the ratings ... One thing I did complain about, three hours is too much for a debate. Yes, it's a long time to be debating but I think it's even worse for people that have to sit up. If there were a two hour debate, it would have been a great debate. Three hours is really unacceptable.
What happened is about a week ago we get a call they were going to make the debate almost an hour more. And you know what that is, that means the advertising is so dense and so deep and they're getting tremendous numbers per minute and per half minute that they just added another 45 minutes to an hour to the debate. That had nothing to do with anything else. So I think that was a shame, because three hours is too long.
Perhaps he shouldn't complain. According to an analysis by National Public Radio, Trump got the lion's share of the debate time: 18 minutes and 47 seconds. That was more than Mike Huckabee and Scott Walker combined.