The final night of the Republican National Convention, headlined by former President Donald Trump’s first speech since an assassination attempt, drew 25.4 million viewers Thursday night across more than a dozen cable and broadcast networks, Nielsen said.

That’s an increase compared with the last night of the RNC in 2020 (23.8 million viewers), but a decline from when Trump gave his acceptance speech on the fourth night of the 2016 convention (32.2 million), according to Nielsen data.

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Viewership peaked Thursday night starting around the 15-minute mark of Trump’s speech, when more than 28 million viewers were tuned in, Nielsen said.

Fox News, by far, had the most viewership Thursday. The network drew 10.4 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour, setting a cable news convention viewership record. Its cable news competitors drew significantly lower viewership: CNN drew 2.2 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour, and MSNBC, a venue for liberal viewers, had 1.3 million.

NBC led in the ratings among the broadcast networks, according to Nielsen.

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Trump’s speech, which lasted longer than 90 minutes and ended just after midnight on the East Coast, set a record in length for a modern convention.

As Trump’s speech dragged on, and the hour got late, a portion of the audience grabbed the remote. During the first 30 minutes of his speech, as Trump gave a vivid reconstruction of last weekend’s assassination attempt, roughly 14.4 million viewers were watching the three major cable news networks, according to data from Nielsen. A vast majority of that viewership came from Fox News.

But in the final half-hour of the speech, beginning at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time, that combined cable news figure fell to 11.4 million viewers, according to the data, roughly a 21% decline compared with an hour earlier.

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Overall, viewership totals for each night of the 2016 convention eclipsed those for this year’s convention. But this week’s RNC bested the 2020 convention in the ratings on three of the four nights, including Thursday.

Nielsen tracks viewership off a television set in the United States, which includes streaming data, but it does not include viewing on phones or laptops.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By John Koblin/Kenny Holston
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