Donald Trump’s Yuge Ratings: RNC Speech Tops Romney’s, McCain’s

Donald Trump’s (very long) speech on the final night of the 2016 Republican National Convention scored more cable news views than Mitt Romney’s comparable turn in 2012 — and even more than John McCain’s 2008 acceptance.

From 10:15 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. ET, when the current GOP presidential candidate’s speech actually happened, CNN soared 132 percent above 2012 in total viewers and 102 percent in the main 25-54 news demo. Big dog Fox News, which topped both cable news and broadcast TV coverage in total viewers and the main demo, was up slightly in its overall audience versus 2012, but down a hair in the demo — for the speech, at least.

MSNBC saw nice double-digit gains from its last RNC closer, up 54 percent in total viewers and 39 percent in the demo.

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Versus 2008, CNN grew 16 percent in total viewers, MSNBC rose 13 percent and FNC ticked up 3 percent. They were all down in the demo to varying degrees when measured against the Sarah Palin year.

For another way of looking at last night, here are the averages across both cable news and broadcast for the 10 o’clock hour itself, broken down by both total viewers and adults 25-54:

Total Viewers (10 p.m. hour)
Fox News – 9.35 million
CNN — 5.48 million
NBC – 4.59 million
ABC – 3.87 million
CBS – 3.81 million
MSNBC 2.95 million

Adults 25-54 (10 p.m.)
Fox News – 2.48 million
CNN – 1.90 million
NBC – 1.77 million
ABC – 1.43 million
CBS  – 1.21 million
MSNBC – 927,000

Readers can check out the fast nationals from just the 10 o’clock hour here, as well as the rest of broadcast’s primetime ratings.

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On Twitter, the RNC landed just north of 2 million tweets from 470,000 unique authors, very comfortably topping the night by that Nielsen social measurement.