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Preliminary ratings for the Democratic National Convention show Kamala Harris’s keynote speech had 22% more viewers than Donald Trump’s address last month.
Harris became the first woman of color to accept a major party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night during her address in Chicago, Illinois.
Some 15 million people tuned into Harris’s 45-minute speech, according to the combined ratings of seven major networks shared by Michael Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics for the Fox Corporation. MSNBC alone averaged 6.8 million viewers during the vice president’s speech.
Meanwhile, Trump’s 90-minute, rambling keynote address, had 12.3 million viewers, according to combined ratings of seven networks.
Harris also had higher ratings in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit — all cities in major swing states. Trump’s keynote speech, meanwhile, beat Harris in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Greensboro, Mulvihill said.
The final night of the DNC saw 14.3 million viewers, according to the combined ratings from seven networks shared by Mulvihill. The Chicago event once again beat the Republican National Convention, which had 12.2 million viewers on its final night.
“All week the DNC has had big leads in the overnights and the margins have narrowed in the final nationals,” Mulvihill wrote on X. “The 17% gap for last night’s full show is close enough that you can’t rule out the possibility of the RNC having the bigger national audience.”
Trump was reportedly concerned about Harris’s speech receiving higher ratings than his ahead of Thursday, two sources close to the campaign told Rolling Stone. The sources claimed Trump brought up the topic multiple times while noting his own “tremendous” viewership.
In response to the report, the Trump campaign told Rolling Stone that “voters know Kamala is weak, failed, and dangerously liberal, and the Democrat ticket is the most radical in American history.”
During her historic keynote speech, Harris pledged to “write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told” and warned listeners about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” she said.
“Imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency … not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself,” she continued.
