Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is only a month old, and her massive rallies have already angered her opponent, Donald Trump, who is obsessed with crowd size. But as the 2024 Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago this week, Trump has shifted to obsessing over the size of something else.
In recent days, according to two sources familiar with the matter, the former president, known for his obsessive interest in ratings, has been asking some of his media and political allies about their expectations for television ratings for the Democratic convention. In private, Trump has been keen to emphasize that the viewership he drew for his televised acceptance speech on the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month was “tremendous,” and that he feels Vice President Harris is unlikely to top his numbers the evening she delivers her big speech.
The Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago on Monday. Harris is scheduled to deliver her acceptance speech on Thursday night. There are about two and a half months left in the crucial presidential contest between Harris and Trump.
Asked about Trump's concerns about Harris' upcoming TV ratings, Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung said, “Voters know Kamala is weak, a failure, and dangerously liberal, and that the Democratic ticket is the most extreme in American history.”
It’s obviously too early to tell whether Trump or Harris will retain bragging rights in viewership. However, recent history is mixed for Trump. In 2016, Trump’s final night of the convention outperformed his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump’s viewership lagged behind Joe Biden, who eventually defeated Trump before dropping out of the 2024 race.
Trump’s private inquiries about the convention ratings come as polls show Harris building on Trump’s huge lead over Biden nationally and in key battleground states — and even pulling ahead of him. That has irked the former president recently, as have the crowd sizes Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have drawn to the rallies.
If Thursday night’s broadcast succeeds in attracting enough viewers, it will give Democratic operatives another tool to try to manipulate Trump’s mind, a recurring theme in Harris and Walz’s messaging. The Harris campaign official puts it simply: Rolling Stone “Yes, of course.” The campaign will publicly attack the Trump team if the vice president’s ratings are higher than his.
Before, during, and after his tenure in the White House, Trump has focused intensely on the measurable size of his audience and television ratings, seeing these metrics as the roots of his political and other power. Indeed, to this day, he still brags about the size of the crowd he mobilized in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021—the culmination of his authoritarian attempts to cling to power, culminating in the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.
He even boasted about the ratings of the press conferences he gave in front of cameras during the coronavirus pandemic, as the country was suffering from economic collapse and a rising death toll on his watch.
Moreover, according to a former senior Trump White House official, in early 2018 the then-president personally ordered his aides to show the press evidence that his State of the Union address that year had the highest television ratings of any commander-in-chief in American history—even though no such evidence existed. “He was just angry that people in the media were going on TV and saying his speech was ‘disgusting.’” [first SOTU] “The ratings were lower than at other times,” the former official recalls.
In the years leading up to his political rise in 2015, the then-future president would regularly ask his staff to pull statements or harass TV hosts and reporters about the ratings of his latest appearance.
In 2013, [Trump] “I asked John Karl about the ratings of an interview he did with him on ABC, and I asked him if he had ‘won the hour,’” Sam Nunberg, a former Trump political adviser, told The Daily Beast. “And other times when he did that, for example, on Fox News shows, he would always ask, [executive assistant] “Ronna Graf would ask the host or his crew at Fox to send him the exact ratings data for an interview he did or a show that was a big hit. Sometimes he would ask them himself. Often, they wouldn’t send him the actual numbers but something like, ‘They were great, I won.’ He followed his ratings closely and always wanted the numbers so he could tweet them.”
