The 2024 Republican National Convention hit its highest viewership on its final night, averaging 25.4 million viewers across networks on Thursday. Viewership peaked at 28.4 million from 10:45 to 11:00 p.m, on the early side of a 90-minute speech made by former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump.
As with the previous nights of the convention, Fox News Channel’s coverage was the most-watched, and in fact set a record for the most-watched cable news convention coverage in history. During the 10:30 p.m to 11:00 p.m. window, the channel averaged 10.9 million viewers on its own, not far behind the 11.7 million viewers that broadcasters NBC, ABC and CBS reached combined.
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Across the full week of the convention, Fox News averaged 7.6 million viewers. NBC was No. 1 among broadcasters with an average 2.9 million viewers, followed by ABC with 2.3 million viewers and CBS with 1.7 million. Back on cable, CNN averaged 1.5 million and MSNBC averaged 1.1 million.
Thursday’s average marks a 41% increase from the average 18 million viewers who tuned in on Wednesday, when vice presidential candidate JD Vance spoke at the convention. Monday, the first night of the convention, hit an average of 18.1 million viewers, which dipped down to 14.8 million viewers on Tuesday.
Trump described the assassination attempt made on him the previous weekend as “a providential experience,” saying, “In a certain way, I felt very safe, because I had God on my side. I really felt that” and telling the crowd that he was “not supposed to be here.”
PvNew co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh, who analyzed Trump’s days as a reality TV star in the book “Apprentice in Wonderland,” wrote that during the “rambling” speech, Trump “did what he does best. He talked, and talked, and talked,” and that “nothing gave Trump more of a thrill than exploiting a personal tragedy in the interest of topping the Nielsen ratings. Trump brought props and photographs as he took the most traumatic experience of his life — surviving an assassination attempt on Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pa. — and made it into a Barbara Walters-worthy tell-all, where he played both interviewer and interviewee.
