Well, the amount of viewers Sarah Palin received didn't really surprise me, but the Nielsen ratings for McCain did... As the title implies, the Democrats will find excuses as to why McCain could have possibly garnered a larger audience. You know, the same smarmy, pretentious ones who refer to John McCain as "Johnny." Don't worry, you're entitled to your viewpoints, and Republicans have the same smarmy, pretentious folks as well - those that refer to Barack Obama as Barack Hussein Obama or Joe Biden as "Joey." In any event, the Democrats will have a couple arguments regarding the numbers given:

• McCain got a huge boost from the NFL game on NBC
• Nielsen doesn't factor in PBS, and doing so puts Obama over the top

Here's the issue with each of these - While McCain did give his speech immediately after the NFL game, there was no net change from the NBC averages of the previous night. In fact, Republicans were worried that the NFL game would push back the speech later into the night, thus having many potential viewers go to sleep. The PBS argument, while valid when presented at face value, overlooks some important details. The ratings throughout the DNC were from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. The RNC did not have any coverage from BET or TV One, and the Univision and Telemundo coverage was only during the final hour of the night. On a side note to this, why Nielsen would rate BET, but not PBS or C-Span is beyond me. Don't the cable and satellite providers automatically have info over what customers are tuned into what channel on their box for statistics? Here's my take on all of this - McCain getting more viewers for his speech than Obama is a surprise. The other surprise I had was that the RNC actually averaged more viewers per night than the DNC at a 34.5 to 30.2 million viewers. This could also be taken a couple ways - first, the Republicans only had three days in the convention, rather than the scheduled four, due to Hurricane Gustav. This allowed them to cram in more "headline" speakers into a shorter time frame. In addition, while Sarah Palin's speech boosted numbers for the GOP, Joe Biden's speech night actually lost viewers from the night before when Hillary spoke. Because the conventions were a different amount of time, it isn't comparing apples to apples and therefore, isn't a realistic comparison. What the pure numbers show, however, is that a McCain-Palin ticket has just as much attention from the American people as the Obama-Biden one does, if not more. Regardless of what the pundits and partisans say, we've got a tight race on our hands and the next two months will be very exciting for political junkies.