Thank God. I think Trump can handle losing the election, but losing a ratings battle to a dial tone like Hillary Clinton might have broken the guy. He’ll be okay now.
The downside: He’ll be mentioning his ratings win not just every day until Election Day but likely every day for the rest of his life.
Clinton’s Thursday night acceptance speech at the DNC averaged 28 million viewers across the six biggest cable and broadcast channels.Trump’s speech at the RNC one week earlier averaged 30 million viewers across the same channels…CNN was by far the highest-rated channel on Thursday, averaging 7.5 million viewers during Clinton’s speech. MSNBC was #2 with 5.3 million viewers. NBC was #3 with 4.5 million.
These are the early numbers. The final figures later today will be slightly better, but probably not enough to erase Trump’s advantage. All three previous nights of the Democratic convention outdrew their Republican counterparts, by the way, and Hillary outdrew Trump last night on CNN and MSNBC. Trump’s margin of ratings victory comes entirely from Fox News, which blew the roof off last Thursday for his speech with 9.3 million viewers but clocked just three million yesterday for Clinton. Did Fox get a big jump for Trump because right-wingers who were already voting for him decided to tune into their favorite network to watch his speech? Or was it a more politically mixed audience that gravitated to Fox last week on the assumption that the Republican news channel is naturally the place to watch the Republican nominee speak? The answer to that question would give us a clue about Trump’s crossover appeal in November.
Obama’s 2012 speech outdrew both Trump and Clinton, but if you missed last week’s postabout convention ratings over time, read that for all of the caveats about shrinking ratings in an age with multifarious media options. Given Trump’s celebrity and the curiosity factor surrounding him, it’s arguably no surprise that he’d draw more of an audience than a ho-hum Democratic nominee. But Hillary’s no ordinary nominee: She’s the first woman major-party nominee in history. The fact that she couldn’t bring out enough viewers to top him despite having a historic storyline to help boost interest is a comment on how “meh” she is to the public. Apart from her husband she’s the biggest known quantity in American politics, the ultimate rerun. And like I said in last night’s convention thread, who wants to watch a rerun when there’s so much else on TV — even when that rerun is a Very Special Episode?
