The presidential contest is drawing more and more interest and the debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was another TV audience peak as it drew approximately 70 million viewers.

The number of viewers was 34% higher compared to last week’s debate between the main figures of this contest: John McCain and Barack Obama. The audience statistics were provided by Nielsen and didn’t include PBS, which estimated that it had about 3.5 million viewers.

The Biden-Palin showdown was the most watched presidential debate since Nielsen began its specialized measurements of audience in 1960. The face off between the two senators blew away the old record for a vice-presidential debate between George H.W. Bush and Geraldine Ferraro. The showdown between the two took place in 1984 and was watched by 56.7 million people.

If the Palin-Biden debate would have been a presidential face off, it would have been the second most watched behind the 1980 dispute between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (80.6 million viewers) and would have shared the second spot with the face off between then-President George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992.

However, the fact that the veep contest stirred more interest in TV viewers compared the face off between their running mates, John McCain and Barack Obama, isn’t such a big surprise. The ingredient which made the Palin-Biden debate such an audience magnet was the fact that one of the two is a TV star (sorry Senator Biden).

Only 52.4 million people tuned in last week to see Barack Obama and John McCain go at it.