NEW YORK _ Early ratings for Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech Thursday at the Democratic National Convention show that it will fall short of Donald Trump's audience from July 22.
The 10 p.m. ET slot that featured Hillary Clinton's speech, a biographical video and an introduction by Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, averaged around 28 million viewers on broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC and cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Nielsen will issue an updated figure later Friday that includes other channels that aired the convention in that hour.
Trump's total was around 35 million, with 32.2 million viewers on eight ad-supported channels plus an additional 2.6 million on PBS. C-SPAN's audience is not included in the Nielsen data.
The Democratic National Convention, which made Clinton the first woman to receive a major party's presidential nomination, had pulled higher ratings than the Republicans over the first three nights this week.
But the streak ended on Thursday. Overall, the Democratic National Convention will finish the week with a higher average audience, which historically has provided no insight on the candidate's chances of victory in the fall. In the last 14 presidential elections, the party with the higher convention ratings lost in November, the last being the Republicans in 2008.
CNN was the top-rated network in the 10 p.m. ET slot, averaging 7.5 million viewers. MSNBC was second with 5.27 million, followed by NBC (4.52 million), ABC (3.86 million), CBS (3.65 million) and Fox News (3.03 million). The speech coverage ended between 11:39 and 11:45 p.m. ET.
