That’s slightly less than the 30.25 million that tuned in to Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech in 2012; however, that figure includes viewership across ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Current, Mun2, PBS and Univision.
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CNN jumped 161% compared to its 2012 total viewer tally and narrowed the gap with Fox News significantly in both compared to the final night of the 2012 RNC.
Viewers flocked to their television sets (or perhaps their phones, laptops, tablets) for the final night of the 2016 Republican National Convention coverage, with multiple networks delivering record numbers for a GOP convention telecast. CNN logged 4.3M viewers (1.4M news demo) and MSNBC averaged 2.4M viewers (716K news demo). The previous high was 4.1 million who tuned into night 2 of the 2008 GOP convention.
In ’08, NBC also had led the pack with 8.7M viewers (4.8M news demo viewers).
MSNBC delivered 3M viewers (927K news demo).
The battle for second place among the broadcast networks delivered somewhat of a surprising result. As was the case for the first three nights, NBC, ABC and CBS didn’t kick off their coverage until 10 p.m. (It should be noted that the network is still erasing years of ratings declines.) MSNBC was up from 2012 as well, almost doubling its total primetime audience (2.95 million vs. 1.57 million) and 25-54 viewers (927,000 vs. 465,000).
More than 22 million people watched the convention across broadcast and cable in the 10 p.m. hour Monday night when Trump’s wife Melania gave her much anticipated speech, once again showing the star power of the Trump name.
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CNN had just over 3 million total viewers, and 893,000 in the 25-54 demo.
