The first night of the Republican National Convention was down in total viewership on both the 2016 edition, and the opening night of this year’s Democratic National Convention.
In total, just under 16 million people tuned in for night 1 of the RNC across the cable news and broadcast networks. That represents a 29% dip from the opening night four years ago, which drew around 22.5 million pairs of eyeballs. For comparison, the first night of last week’s DNC drew 18.7 million viewers (which was itself down 27% from 2016).
Looking at the networks individually, Fox News unsurprisingly came out on top by a mile, drawing 7.1 million viewers in the 10 to 11 p.m. time slot. CNN placed second with just over 2 million viewers, followed by ABC with just under 2 million. NBC drew 1.7 million viewers to its coverage, followed by MSNBC with 1.6 million, and finally CBS with 1.5 million.
Fox News also dominated the key news demographic of people aged 25-54, in which the network scored 1.6 million viewers. That’s around 1 million more than its closest rival CNN, which delivered 600,000 in the demo.
The fact that the 2020 DNC and RNC are on course to be substantially down on the last edition isn’t necessarily surprising given that much of this year’s convention is pre-taped and that television viewership as a whole has declined significantly in the last four years.
That explains why Tucker and Hannity broke away all night long to comment on how good it was. That’s in order to avoid showing how dull it was.
The Democrats tried to mix it up and turn it into a real TV show since the live event wasn’t available. Trump is making his into a live event anyway — without any of the energy and spontaneity. I doubt the ratings are going to get better. After all, he’s all over the thing already. It’s hard to imagine there will be much excitement about hearing from him at the end.