Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday at the Democratic National Convention pulled in just under 34 million viewers, falling short of Donald Trump’s audience from July 22.
The 10 p.m. ET slot that featured Hillary Clinton’s speech, a biographical video and an introduction by Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, averaged around 29.8 million viewers on broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC and Univision and cable channels CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business News and NBC Universo. Another 3.9 million watched on PBS.
Trump’s total was around 35 million, with 32.2 million viewers on eight ad-supported channels plus an additional 2.6 million on PBS. C-SPAN’s audience is not included in the Nielsen data.
The Democratic National Convention, which made Clinton the first woman to receive a major party’s presidential nomination, had pulled higher ratings than the Republicans over the first three nights this week.
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Trump
Clinton
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Sources: Nielsen, PBS
@latimesgraphics
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But the streak ended on Thursday. Overall, the Democratic National Convention will finish the week with a higher average audience, which historically has provided no insight on the candidate’s chances of victory in the fall. In the last 14 presidential elections, the party with the higher convention ratings lost in November, the last being the Republicans in 2008.
CNN was the top-rated network in the 10 p.m. ET slot, averaging 7.5 million viewers. MSNBC was second with 5.27 million, followed by NBC (4.52 million), ABC (3.86 million), CBS (3.65 million) and Fox News (3.03 million). The speech coverage ended between 11:39 and 11:45 p.m. ET.
There is no available data on how many people watched Clinton or Trump’s speeches online. Both Democratic and Republican conventions likely had significant number of viewers watching as various networks and social media sites offered streams.
CNN said it had 11 million “video starts” on desktop computers and mobile devices during the final day of the Democratic National Convention.
CBSN, the digital streaming service of CBS News, said 7 million visitors tuned in to its gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Republican National Convention last week.