Fact-checking Trump’s claim that GOP midterm convention audience beat the NFL

President Donald Trump was quick to boast about how many Americans tuned in to the Republicans’ midterm convention, but the facts don’t back him up.

On Sept. 10, hours after he gave a nearly two-hour address at the convention, Trump posted to Truth Social, “The Republican Midterm Convention last night, in Dallas, was a major, sold out hit, far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible. It was really something, streaming all over the place, and really big numbers, despite going up against the NFL. The overall numbers beat the NFL.”

The president is known for trumpeting how much of a splash his events make with the public. Notably, in 2017, Trump’s then-press secretary said his swearing-in was “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” We rated that Pants on Fire. 

As a former TV star, Trump has often focused on his television audience ratings. In 2011 — four years before he first ran for president — we rated his claim that his show “The Celebrity Apprentice” was “the No. 1 show on NBC” Half True. 

With his comments on the Sept. 10 and 11 midterm convention, Trump jumped the gun on the official release of Nielsen’s industry-standard television ratings. After those numbers came out a few days later, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter wrote that the two NFL games broadcast at the same time as the convention collectively had more than 43 million viewers, compared with about 7 million collectively for the convention.

When we asked the White House for data to support Trump’s assertion, a spokesperson pointed us to a different metric: social media impressions.

The White House cited an X post by a Trump adviser, Alex Bruesewitz, that said, “Livestreams on @TeamTrump’s TikTok generated more than 70 million combined impressions across nights one and two.” The White House also cited an article on the conservative website Breitbart that discussed social media impressions.

However, experts on social media said you can’t assume social media impressions represent a gangbusters reach.

Impressions are “not comparable to Nielsen ratings in any meaningful sense,” said Nick Reiners, a senior analyst in geotechnology with the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.

Comparing TV ratings for the events

Based on TV ratings alone, the midterm convention audience did not beat the NFL games. 

NBC Sports reported that its Nielsen ratings for the league’s Sept. 10 season opener between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots — a Super Bowl LX rematch — drew 25.1 million viewers. That game aired at the same time as Trump’s address on the convention’s first night.

The second game of the season — the San Francisco 49ers-Los Angeles Rams faceoff in Australia — coincided with the convention’s second night. It drew 18.5 million viewers, according to the NFL. Vice President JD Vance was the keynote speaker, and Trump gave a shorter address afterward.

Stelter looked at Nielsen data for three channels that aired Trump’s first-night speech live: Fox News, Newsmax and NewsNation. He found that Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers — similar to its level on a “normal night.” Newsmax had about 400,000 viewers and NewsNation had about 125,000, Stelter wrote. He also found that the “most-viewed YouTube videos of Trump’s night one speech have only hundreds of thousands of views.”

Together, this puts the television and streaming audience for Trump somewhere around 3.3 million — far less than the 25.1 million from the NFL season opener.

The same pattern held for the convention’s second night, Stelter found. Night two averaged 2.6 million viewers on Fox News, 350,000 on Newsmax and about 100,000 on NewsNation, compared with 18.5 million for the NFL game in Australia.

How do social media impressions compare?

Social media impressions come with important caveats, experts told PolitiFact.

On popular social media platforms such as TikTok, an “impression” does not require “engagement,” such as a click, a like, a comment, a share or even an extended viewing. An impression simply means that content appeared on a user’s feed. Maybe that user read, watched or interacted with it — but maybe not. 

Even if TikTok users quickly swipe past a post, it is still counted as an impression. And if a post appeared multiple times in a person’s feed, it would be counted as an impression each time.

Impressions are like “a lottery ticket for a chance at engagement,” said Justin H. Gross, director of the data analytics and computational social science program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Impression metrics are used to sell ads, and advertisers “can use this metric to get a relative sense of opportunities for engagement and pay for these opportunities, even if many, or most, are not realized,” Gross said.

By contrast, Nielsen has a minimum view time of at least a minute in length to count as having reached someone, said Jen Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland-College Park’s College of Information. TikTok and Facebook also have alternative metrics that show whether users viewed a post for between two and six seconds. That would be a more notable action by a user than an impression.

“Of the estimated 25 million viewers of these NFL games, I imagine almost all watched at least some of the game,” Gross said. “Sure, they may leave to use the bathroom or grab some wings, but most have actively chosen to watch a game.”

Making an apples-to-apples comparison for impression data is tricky, because those numbers are not public. We asked the NFL for impressions for its first two games but did not hear back.

Information that has publicly surfaced about impressions for other major events puts the midterm convention on the smaller side, Gross said.

“In 2022, (World Wrestling Entertainment’s) Wrestlemania 38 claimed 2.2 billion impressions, and Super Bowl LVI the same year had 1.8 billion impressions,” he said.

The convention impression figures “are good numbers, but it’s not uncommon to get more than 34 million impressions for popular accounts,” Golbeck said, citing as examples the accounts for CNN, the NFL or Taylor Swift.