"Asked about the differences," the Times' Jim Rutenberg reports, "Mr. Trump said he could not speak to them with much specificity, because 'I didn’t produce our show — I just showed up for the final speech on Thursday.'" That's not entirely true; he spoke on the first night, memorably emerging to "We Are the Champions." He also attended the third night, interrupting Ted Cruz's non-endorsement speech.

A fundraising email Trump sent on Thursday suggested to his supporters that they not watch the final night of the Democratic convention. And it seems like ... that might have worked?

Or, anyway, as CNN media reporter Brian Stelter tweeted, the fourth-and-final night of the Democratic convention, the most-watched of the four, doesn't seem to have done as well as the final night of Trump's. This is incomplete data, which will be finalized by Nielsen on Friday. But comparing what Trump saw last week to where the Democrats are this week -- the last two columns below -- the Republicans seem to have an advantage.

This probably isn't really because of Trump's email. During the third night of each convention, the ratings for each party were about the same, down from the big advantages the Democrats had seen for the first two nights.

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The Democratic convention in 2012 was only three days in length, so there's no fourth day to compare to this year. But it seems likely that the last night in 2012 saw far more viewers than the last night this year -- in contrast to the Republicans, who had higher ratings in 2016 than 2012. The peak for Republican conventions recently came in 2008, when Sarah Palin's emergence powered a huge boom in viewership.

There are a lot of caveats here, not the least of which is that those final night ratings for the Democrats aren't yet finalized. (Another caveat: This doesn't include C-SPAN or streaming viewership.) But it looks like, at the last second, Donald Trump managed to snatch a victory in one of the metrics where he has so often triumphed before: TV viewership.