Trump's red-state tour and GOP soft spots: Brooks and Atkins Stohr on PBS NewsHour
The Friday analysis segment, cut from the full broadcast, drew far more viewers on its own than the whole episode it came from.
PBS NewsHourStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 285,864 views a day, 17 times a normal first day on this channel (17,220).
Brooks and Atkins Stohr on GOP vulnerabilities in the midterms
PBS NewsHour's Friday politics conversation is one of the oldest habits in television news, and this week's edition traveled much farther than usual. Geoff Bennett sat down with David Brooks of The Atlantic and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe to talk through the week. Their main subject was the midterms: President Trump on the campaign trail in a run of reliably Republican states, and where the party looks vulnerable heading into November. They also turned to the administration's strategy on artificial intelligence.
Posted as its own clip, the segment came close to 300,000 views in its first day. A new NewsHour video usually ends its first day at a small fraction of that, and the likes climbed at a similar pace. The full Friday broadcast, where the conversation sits about halfway through, started strongly too, but the standalone cut left it well behind.
It was a busy weekend across the channel. A report on Gov. Kathy Hochul naming New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor in a Cornell University rape case drew a large audience. So did a live stream of lava pouring from Hawaii's Kīlauea, and Ben Tracy's Tipping Point report on Colorado River cuts coming to Arizona, Nevada and California. Even so, an hour of two columnists talking politics led them all.
The channel's daily views ran at about double their usual pace, a weekend carried by elections, water and a volcano.
Published on Trari
Read next
Is this your channel?
Share the story with your audience: in a community post, in your channel's description or on your socials. The text and the badge are ready.
You may use the picture, the badge, and link it to this story.
- Channel
- PBS NewsHour
- Subscribers
- 5,380,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 13,497,434
- Channel views, pace per day
- 2,745,768 (on a normal day: 1,373,114)
- Video published
- October 2, 2026
- Video views so far
- 321,228 (2 days online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 205,291
The numbers
Several videos started fast at once, and the political conversation ran furthest ahead of a usual first day.
💡 Test your knowledge
David Brooks became widely known for a 2000 book about the new educated upper class. What is it called?
Brooks published Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There in 2000, coining 'bobo' for the bourgeois bohemian.
