Approximately 500,000 more people watched Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech for her nomination on Thursday than watched former President Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican convention, with an average of 28.9 million viewers across cable television, according to Nielsen figures.
The Democratic National Convention’s fourth night of programming had an audience of over 26 million viewers overall, with 6.7 million of those viewers falling into the coveted 18–54 age group, according to Nielsen. Over the course of the four nights, the DNC attracted over 3 million more people on average than the RNC did last month—an average of 21.8 million viewers as opposed to the RNC’s 18.9 million viewers.
According to the numbers made public on Friday, the DNC in 2024 attracted an average of almost 200,000 more viewers than in 2020, but 8.2 million fewer than in 2016, when thirty million people witnessed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton become the first female presidential nominee accepted by a major party.
With Oprah, Tony Goldwyn, and other prominent Democrats in attendance, this year’s convention was a huge benefit for MSNBC, which attracted a sizable portion of the overall TV viewership.
During Harris’ 40-minute speech, which MSNBC said was the network’s biggest audience ever for a DNC, the show saw an average of over 6.5 million people between 9 and 11:30 p.m. on Thursday. CNN reported that more than 3.9 million viewers watched the DNC’s fourth night.
When Trump accepted the Republican nomination at the RNC in July, for example, Fox News claimed to have drawn over 10 million viewers during that hour. Similar to Harris, Trump gave a speech on the final night of his convention, and Nielsen numbers show that 28.4 million people watched it on all major TV networks.
President Joe Biden’s late-night speech on the first night of the Democratic National Convention drew over 19 million people, according to Nielsen, which is somewhat fewer than the 20 million DNC watchers on cable television that evening. Tuesday’s event attracted 21 million viewers, including former president Barack Obama.
