Wednesday’s Democratic debates brought in a decent amount of viewers but paled in comparison to the viewership during the debates of the 2016 elections.

According to The Hill, NBC brought in some 10 million viewers. A good crowd to be sure, but if the Democrats were looking for a blockbuster night, they didn’t get it:

The 10 million viewership number only pertains to NBC. MSNBC and Telemundo also simulcasted the debate. Those numbers are also expected Thursday afternoon from Nielsen.

For context, the first Republican debate of the 2016 presidential primary season on Fox News, which featured then-real estate mogul Donald Trumpas a front-runner in his first political debate, drew more than 24 million viewers in August 2015.

On the Democratic side in 2015, CNN drew 15.3 million viewers for a debate headlined by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and three other candidates.

There’s a good reason for this, too.

One of the things you try to avoid in comedy is going as blue as you can as quickly as you can. Shock laughs can be funny, but they don’t have a long shelf life, and it leaves you very few places to go afterward.

Looking at the Democratic debate last night made me think of this rule, only the Democrats didn’t start by leading off with the most shocking thing they could say, they came into the debate right after the shocking parts of the Democrat party had had their say. The “eat the rich” and “orange man bad” positions they took is something we’ve been listening to now for a long time. You can only clutch your pearls over hearing leftist politicians talk about their exorbitant tax plans and radical plans to solve climate change so much.

In short, we didn’t hear anything different, just the same bad jokes that lost their edge. We didn’t listen to anything that would have enlightened us as to why we should seriously consider any of these Democrats as a viable candidate. The radical positions the Democrats now feel they should take are positions most Americans have already ruled out.

But aside from the fact that the debates were about as substantial as a ghost party, the real reason people couldn’t bring themselves to care was that the elections are likely already decided. Just last March, the election was being called for Trump by economists who were telling us that the economy is too strong under the current president, and history tells us that a strong economy is almost a guaranteed reelection for the guy running it.

Trump isn’t going anywhere. You know that, I know that, and the Democrats know that, too. They may try, or at least give the impression that they’re trying, but at the end of the day, Trump has the economy and his incumbency working in his favor. Not to mention the fact that people like the guy despite a media throwing Trump’s bad poll numbers around like confetti. He’s filling stadiums with overflow in the thousands. Most Democrats would be lucky to fill a room at the Y.

There are no stakes. The die was cast and it already came up Trump. Save for a miracle for the Democrats, a second term is inevitable.

At this time we’re watching to see which panderer will lose to Donald Trump.

It’s time better spent doing anything else at all.