The numbers are In fact, the Democratic National Convention had more viewers than the Republican National Convention last month.
Preliminary figures from Nielsen Fast Nationals indicate that the final night of the Democratic National Convention drew 26.20 million viewers across 15 networks, compared to the fourth night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, which drew 25.4 million viewers.
The Democratic National Convention drew a larger audience across 12 different television and radio news networks over the four nights of the convention: 20 million viewers on Monday, 20.6 million viewers on Tuesday, 20.2 million viewers on Wednesday, and an estimated 26.20 million viewers on Thursday.
By contrast, the Republican National Conventions drew 18.1 million, 14.8 million, 18 million, and 25.4 million viewers on each of their four nights, respectively.
These numbers don't even take into account the hundreds of thousands who watched the conference on independent streaming services like YouTube, Twitch and other social media platforms.
While Vice President Kamala Harris was delivering her nomination speech on Thursday, her opponent, former President Donald Trump, went into a meltdown on multiple platforms, and the meltdown continued into Friday.
Perhaps one factor in the former president's disintegration was his fear that more people were paying more attention to Harris than to him. As I mentioned earlier, Rolling Stone, Days before the convention began, Trump had been teasing the media and his political allies to assure them that the Democratic National Convention would have fewer viewers than his own convention.
From ratings to crowd sizes, the former reality TV star has long been obsessed with measuring how much people like him — an obsession Democrats were keen to mock during the convention.
On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama — whose inauguration crowd Trump infamously claimed was smaller than his — mocked his successor’s obsession with size as a sign that he was compensating for…other shortcomings. The Democratic National Convention’s viewership isn’t the only metric by which Harris is outperforming Trump. According to July fundraising figures, Harris’s campaign more than quadrupled the former president’s cash haul last month — a staggering $204 million compared to Trump’s $48 million.
