Who actually watches political conventions?

It apparently takes people over half a century before they begin to care about the Democratic or Republican National Conventions — or at least about watching them on TV. Nielsen numbers show that for night one of the Republican Convention this year, 14 million of the 23 million people who tuned in were older than the age of 55:

Historically, this trend tends to be true, with most of the viewers of the last three conventions belonging to the 55+ crowd. The numbers came close to being even at the 2012 Democratic convention, when 50 percent of the audience was 55 or older, The Washington Post reports. One exception to the norm was 2008, when Barack Obama accepted his party's nomination; 57 percent of the audience watching was under 55 that year.

Regardless of the numbers tending to skew older, Americans typically love their convention coverage — a report in 2012 found that about two-thirds of Americans watched at least part of the 2008 convention, rivaling Olympic coverage. "It really is a nonsense argument to say no one watches the conventions," University of Oklahoma professor Jill Edy told USA Today. "People who are politically interested already — for them, this is appointment television."

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