The momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped push the ratings for the Democratic National Convention past the Republican festivities for former President Trump.
Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.
The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.
The speech caps a successful week for the Democratic National Convention, which topped the audience for the GOP’s gathering every night this week.
Harris being thrust to the top of the ticket after President Biden decided to end his reelection campaign on July 21 — one of the wildest political twists in U.S. history — has energized Democratic voters who were unhappy to have a rematch of the 2020 campaign.
Harris used the speech to reintroduce herself to the public, going heavy on biographical details and her work as a prosecutor in California.
Harris may have also gotten a boost from false rumors that music superstars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift were coming to the United Center in Chicago to perform at the event.
The rumblings — which tabloid news website TMZ reported as fact in the case of Beyoncé — were repeated by several network anchors.
The Harris campaign is likely to feel encouraged by how her speech outperformed Trump’s in a number of cities in the swing states where the election will be decided in the electoral college.
Harris averaged 50% more viewers than Trump in Philadelphia, 36% more in Detroit, 31% more in Raleigh, N.C., and 21% more in Atlanta, according to Nielsen.
Harris underperformed Trump by 10% in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held.
MSNBC, the home team channel for liberal voters, saw its largest audience ever for a Democratic convention, averaging 6 million Thursday and 5.2 million viewers over four nights.
CNN was second for the week with 3.6 million viewers, followed by ABC (3.3 million), NBC (2.5 million), CBS (2.2 million) and Fox News (2.4 million).
MSNBC also had the most viewers in the 25-to-54 age group most coveted by advertisers, edging CNN by around 10,000 viewers in the category — a first.
CNN had won the demographic audience segment by much wider margins in 2016 and 2020.
Fox News, which injects conservative, pro-Trump commentary into its coverage, made a concerted effort to book more Democratic politicians this year — four times as many as it did in 2016. But the network has never been a first stop for the party’s conventions.
After Harris completed her speech, Trump called into Fox News to criticize it. Several times he pressed the keys on his phone as he ranted to anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.
(Fox News was the most watched network for the Republican convention by a wide margin, averaging 6.6 million viewers over the four nights and 9.8 million viewers on the final session.)
Harris’ speech was probably watched by millions more people on streaming platforms.
Fox Corp.’s LiveNOW, an ad-supported free streaming site that presents raw news video without any commentary, peaked at 117,000 concurrent viewers Thursday, and 75,000 throughout the week with continuous convention coverage.
CNN does not reveal data for its live stream on parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max platform. But the network said the four days of the convention rank in the top 10 in daily usage since the service was launched last fall.
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