The Slatest

Hillary May Have Won the Convention War, but She Did Not Win the Ratings War

Hillary Clinton acknowledges the crowd at the end on the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Democratic National Convention may have served as a pointed and optimistic retort to Donald Trump’s dark and gloomy vision of America. It may have done the impossible and gotten Republicans to praise President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It did not do one thing, though: Its culminating night did not get more viewers than that of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention.

CNN reported on Friday that Clinton’s acceptance speech was watched by roughly 28 million viewers, which is two million fewer than watched Trump’s acceptance speech in Cleveland one week ago.

“That’s the downside to running for Obama’s third term, nobody watches repeats in the summer,” Trump communications director Jason Miller told CNN’s Brian Stelter in a burn so hot it could melt ice cream.

Ratings are very important to Trump. During the Republican nominating process he would constantly cite high debate ratings as evidence of his popularity and told CNN that “this tremendous increase in viewer interest and advertising is due 100% to ‘Donald J. Trump.’”

So chalk this one as a win for Trump after a tough week in which he looked like he might not claim the rating wars—the ratings for the previous three nights of the star-studded DNC had edged out the first three nights of the RNC by millions of viewers. “I didn’t produce our show—I just showed up for the final speech on Thursday,” Trump had told the Times of the differences between his program and that of the Democrats.

Now, he will need to be making no more such excuses.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.