Donald Trump outpaces Hillary Clinton in nomination speech viewers

A computer service used by the campaign of Hillary Clinton was hacked as part of a broader breach of the Democratic National Committee, an intrusion for which the Russian government is the leading suspect, the campaign said Friday.

The breach affected a DNC data analytics program used by the campaign and a number of other organizations, according to the campaign. A spokesman said outside security experts reviewing the campaign’s computer system have found that “no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised.”

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Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday at the Democratic National Convention pulled in just under 34 million viewers, falling short of Donald Trump’s audience from July 22.

The 10 p.m. ET slot that featured Hillary Clinton’s speech, a biographical video and an introduction by Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, averaged around 29.8 million viewers on broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC and Univision and cable channels CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business News and NBC Universo. Another 3.9 million watched on PBS.

Trump’s total was around 35 million, with 32.2 million viewers on eight ad-supported channels plus an additional 2.6 million on PBS. C-SPAN’s audience is not included in the Nielsen data.

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The “lock her up” chants, a fan favorite among Republicans since the GOP convention last week, began about 45 minutes into Donald Trump’s speech here Friday.

But instead of issuing his stock response to the refrain he issued during his acceptance speech — tamping it down with a call to defeat Hillary Clinton in November — the GOP presidential candidate told supporters he’s starting to agree with calls for his Democratic rival’s incarceration.

“I’ve been nice,” Trump said. But, he added, after the “lies” of Clinton’s convention speech Thursday night, “I don’t have to be so nice anymore. I’m taking the gloves off.”

With his declaration of “no more Mr. Nice Guy,” Trump seemed to signal a new phase in this already-chippy presidential campaign.

In his first public appearance since the close of the Democratic convention, Trump unleashed fresh jabs at Clinton. He called her Thursday night speech, in which she became the first woman to accept a major-party presidential nomination, “so average.” He delighted in newly released television ratings that found the viewership for his nomination acceptance speech was higher that for than Clinton’s.

But the real estate mogul also spent a significant portion of his remarks re-litigating some of his more controversial moments in the GOP primary.

He addressed his nearly year-old remarks about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, after whose performance as moderator in the first debate in August he described as having “blood coming out of her nose, blood coming out of her wherever.”

“I was talking about her nose. Maybe her ears,” he explained, not implicitly referring to menstruation, as was widely interpreted.

He then went on an extended riff about his feud with New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, sparked by the reporter disputing Trump’s characterization that thousands of Muslims celebrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Back in November, Trump mocked Kovaleski, drawing in his arm and using jerky movements. The impression resembled the reporter’s disability, but Trump denied he meant to be deliberately mocking.

On Thursday, Trump insisted he was simply doing an impersonation of somebody “groveling,” and said attacking the disabled “is not in my vocabulary.”

Despite being months old, both comments have figured prominently into Clinton’s attacks on Trump, particularly as the Democrat seeks to woo independent women in November.

Attendees at the afternoon rally, held in an auditorium at the University of Colorado’s campus in Colorado Springs, said they want to see Trump continue his brash, unpredictable persona in the general.

“Let Trump be Trump!” said Kathy Schegel, a 58-year-old from Elbert County, northeast of Colorado Springs.

Ernie Albertsen, a retired general contractor from Colorado Springs, said he appreciated Trump’s “realism,” particularly when he accepted the GOP nomination in Cleveland last week.

“The way he comes off is off-the-cuff and as a true American,” he said.

Albertsen, a longtime Republican, was unimpressed with the Democrats’ confab this week, dismissing the speakers as “barking like rabid dogs.”

His wife, Jeanne Noel, an independent who is voting for Trump, said she’s bracing for a close election after watching the Clinton’s nomination this week.

“It really worried me — there’s so much support for Hillary,” Noel said. “I was scared for the first time for Trump.”

Hillary Clinton visited a toy factory here on Friday to talk about her economic plans, but it was her history-making status that some in the audience wanted to discuss.

For them, the chance to elect the first female president to succeed the first black president was a sign of significant progress for the country.

Becca Burnett, 35, said Obama and Clinton would be the only presidents her young children would know.

“How amazing would it be if they grew up in that world?” she said. “It says things to them the world didn’t say to me.”

Chris Wiseman, 43, said he’s been on the fence about voting for Clinton but thinks of what her presidency would mean for his 2-year-old daughter.

“That’s a huge thing for me,” he said. “I wish that was played up more.”

Clinton has been seizing the moment. Her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, introduced her at the factory as a “history-making public servant.” And at an earlier rally in Philadelphia, her campaign blasted the Sheryl Crow anthem “Woman in the White House.”

She kept her focus on criticizing Donald Trump’s business track record in her speech in Hatfield.

“It’s only fair to ask, how did you become successful?” Clinton said. “We don’t resent success in America. But we do resent people who take advantage of others in order to line their own pockets.”

Three years after the Supreme Court deemed a key anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act unnecessary, a federal court on Friday ruled that a subsequently imposed North Carolina law requiring photo IDs at polling places was aimed at discouraging minority turnout.

The decision, just three months before election day, likely gives Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign a boost by removing potential voting barriers that would have fallen hardest on African Americans and other Democratic-leaning voters.

The strongly worded decision by a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., blasted the Republican-led state Legislature, all but charging lawmakers with racism in passing a law that also curtailed voting times.

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To say the least, it has been a busy two weeks in American politics. With the media and TV audiences fixed on topics including the future of the country, speech plagiarism and who’s still feeling the Bern, there was a sartorial showdown that might have been overlooked. And no, this one didn’t involve anyone wearing a Hillary Clinton-style pantsuit.

This fashion face-off pitted last week’s Republican National Convention against this week’s Democratic National Convention.

Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and a former fashion model, appeared onstage in Cleveland to give her speech (which included passages from First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic convention).

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The Republican presidential nominee is in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Friday.

With little more than 100 days before the November election, Hillary Clinton on Friday worked the dual angles that she believes will ensure victory: touting her understanding of persistent economic woes and insulting Donald Trump.

In her first post-convention appearance, Clinton pressed the notion that the nation had “made progress” economically and that under her, it would further improve.

“I’m not satisfied with the status quo; I’m not telling you everything is peachy keen,” Clinton said.

She reiterated her promise of a huge investment in infrastructure and new jobs in industries like technology, clean energy and advanced manufacturing. Such measures are appealing in former industrial areas of the politically important Midwest.

“I think that we’ve got to have more good jobs — we’ve got to raise wages,” said Clinton, who was accompanied by her husband, Bill, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, on the campus of Temple University.

“We’ve got to make this economy work for everyone, not just those at the top.”

That sort of economic argument is often a difficult one for candidates like Clinton, who are asking voters to give a third successive presidential term to the same party. She’s in the position of praising President Obama’s tenure — which must be seen positively for her to succeed — but also acknowledging its shortcomings.

She suggested she would accomplish the difficult task of full employment.

“Anybody willing to work in America should be able to find a job to get ahead and stay ahead,” she said.

After the event, Clinton and Kaine set off for a three-day bus tour through Pennsylvania and Ohio, where she said they would visit places “where people are making things.”

Both states have regularly voted Democratic in recent presidential contests, but Republicans are hoping that Trump’s appeal to blue-collar workers will reverse that course.

Holding those states is central to Clinton’s success in November, so she coupled her economic argument with a sharply anti-Trump message.

“His speech and his whole convention seemed to be more about insulting me than helping the American people,” she said of Trump, gliding over the fact that the Democratic convention was nearly as anti-Trump as his was anti-Clinton.

Using the nation’s founders and their work in Philadelphia as a contrast, Clinton criticized Trump’s convention speech argument that he “alone” would be able to fix America’s ills. She had made the same criticism in her Thursday night convention speech.

Clinton said that Trump had painted a negative and divided picture of “a country in decline,” and that assertions that only he could right the problems “set off alarm bells.”

The founders, she said, “knew they didn’t want one person, one man, to have all the power, like a king.”

Speakers at the Friday event worked to reinforce the themes of the just-concluded convention, referring to Clinton’s historic achievement as the first female major party nominee and to the effect that would have on girls and women.

None too subtly, the music selections played before Clinton’s arrival included Sheryl Crow’s “Time to Put A Woman in the White House.”

Hillary Clinton’s formal acceptance of the Democratic nomination for president came with a nod to her decades at the center of American politics — and to the introduction she still needs to make if she is to win in November.

One of the best-known women in the world since the 1990s, Clinton is betting that she can defy the negative impressions that most voters have of her and restore some measure of trust with a distrustful electorate.

“Now, sometimes the people at this podium are new to the national stage,” she said, adding with sardonic timing: “As you know, I’m not one of those people.

“I get that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” she said. “So let me tell you.”

The first woman to become the presidential nominee of a major political party then detailed the years she had spent in public service and her goals for a presidency. She did spend time criticizing her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. But criticism of a man less popular even than she is not Clinton’s chief need for the next three and a half months.

Clinton’s challenge, instead, is to persuade people to accept the version of her forwarded at the convention.

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Whatever you may think of Hillary Clinton — and few are neutral — her accomplishment this week cannot be denied.

Just as Barack Obama’s election held deeper meaning for black voters, Clinton’s nomination as the first female presidential candidate of a major party has a special resonance for women. That “highest, hardest glass ceiling” she famously put 18 million cracks in back in 2008, may finally give come November.

Some embrace her wholeheartedly, saying it is long past time for a woman in the Oval Office.

Some think the more meaningful barrier came down in 2008, when Americans elected the first black president.

Some are ambivalent; the symbolism is important, they say, but the candidate is lacking.

But there’s one thing on which they all can agree: No matter who becomes the 45th president, this is a watershed moment for women in America.

We asked women of varying ages, backgrounds and political leanings what they make of Clinton and this moment in history.

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Hillary Clinton is kicking off a three-day bus tour with a rally at Temple University in Philadelphia on Friday. A line of people waiting to get in stretched around the block two hours before it was expected to begin.

After the rally, Clinton is scheduled to make more stops in Pennsylvania with her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, before continuing on to Ohio

A pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC plans to launch a $10-million ad campaign next week that focuses on boosting voter turnout, especially in minority communities.

Priorities USA’s new campaign will air ads directed at African Americans in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the super PAC’s chief strategist, Guy Cecil, told Politico. It will also use $2 million for a coalition of Hispanic groups in Colorado, Florida and Nevada.

And as expected, part of the campaign will include attacks on Clinton’s GOP rival Donald Trump and his “divisive nature,” Cecil added.

“It will really be along those two tracks — the divisive nature and that you’ll see us target those messages to different communities and voters throughout the country,” he said.

Priorities USA has raised and plans to use its bank of about $142 million in donations, $12 million of which it collected in June alone. Cecil said the Democratic National Convention added a fresh boost to donations too.

“Our expectations of Democrats looking at the race needs to be that we are going to be in a single-point race through election day much like we were through 2008 and 2012,” he said.

Relive the highlights of the Democratic National Convention’s final night.

Ray Whitehouse and Cleon Arrey present the evening in less than 3 minutes:

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What you missed on the closing day of the Democratic National Convention. More coverage at latimes.com/conventions. See other Democratic roundups here and catch up on the Republian convention here.

Here’s Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 of the DNC.

Miss any of the most important moments from the RNC? Here’s the playlist.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

1. The Clinton campaign sees multiple paths to victory

If it’s possible to both run to the left and to the center at the same time, the Clinton campaign is doing it.

In a speech in which Hillary Clinton appealed directly to the supporters of her erstwhile primary rival, she also drew applause in the hall with praise of Republicans on a night of flag-waving, military-saluting, Constitution-embracing appeals to patriotism. “Whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign,” Clinton said.

President Obama just a day before made a point of saying that Donald Trump’s views were neither Republican nor conservative. And preceding Clinton Thursday were speeches from former and current Republicans who said it was Clinton who would be the better one to advance the nation’s interests. She praised John McCain and noted that both her running mate and Donald Trump’s have sons serving in the Marines.

At the same time, and even with the occasional distraction of Bernie Sanders supporters still registering their dissent, Clinton did not back off the platform they had called for, stating that “the minimum wage should be a living wage,” that people shouldn’t be trapped by college debt, and most of all that she would “follow the money,” asking more of Wall Street and the “super-rich” while addressing a political system that gives them outsized influence.

What could have been a classic base-turnout maximization presidential campaign against another Republican is instead a campaign in which Clinton’s team at least sees an opportunity to try to expand her appeal beyond reliable Democrats. She knows many Republicans are uncomfortable with Trump. She tried to make it easier for some of them to vote for her, rather than not vote at all.

One possible added incentive: it may not just be the best path for victory, but for governing with a clear mandate that could come with it.

2. Clinton recognizes, and in some cases embraces, her flaws. At least some of them

Clinton knew she would never give as eloquent a speech as Obama, as passionate a speech as Joe Biden, or as emotional an appeal as Michelle Obama. Certainly she wouldn’t outdo her husband, the folksy “explainer in chief.”

And so Clinton decided she wouldn’t reach for poetry when she could go heavy on prose.

“It’s true. I sweat the details,” she said in a policy-laden speech.

But that wasn’t the only example. Early on, she spoke of a relationship with her husband that has offered both “joy, and hard times that tested us.” She noted that she was not a figure new to the national stage, but that many still don’t have a sense of why she has made public service her calling.

What she did not do was explicitly acknowledge the issues that have contributed most recently to negative impressions of her, especially her decision to conduct business on a personal email account instead of the State Department’s. There would not be an effort to counter the “crooked” charge that Trump has branded her with. She will do so in other settings, but not before the biggest audience she’ll address until the debates.

3. She acknowledged the historic moment in hopes the nation would stand with her

As Chelsea Clinton introduced her mother, the Clinton campaign tweeted a photo of the beaming candidate watching backstage. After a biographical video played and Clinton joined her daughter, her expression revealed the emotion of the moment.

“Standing here as my mother’s daughter, and my daughter’s mother, I’m so happy this day has come,” Clinton said as she acknowledged the milestone.

But as she formally accepted the nomination, and became the first woman to do so for a major party ticket, she sought to articulate that it was not just a personal victory.

“When any barrier falls in America, for anyone, it clears the way for everyone,” she said. “When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit.”

When Clinton ran for president the first time, her campaign seemed intent at first to downplay the potential historic nature of her candidacy. It became more overt once it was clear the party would have its first African American nominee instead.

Words like “our,” “America” and “your” consistently rank among the most-used words in the speeches made by the major party candidates at their conventions.

To see how similar (or different) this year’s candidates were from the past, we compared Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speeches to all Republican and Democratic presidential candidates since 1980.

Check out how they rank among their peers.

We asked World Champion of Public Speaking Mohammed Qahtani, right, and Toastmasters International President Jim Kokocki to weigh in on Hillary Clinton’s convention speech.

How did she do?

The quantity and depth of ideas were almost overwhelming at times, but she showed strengths well, and while the speech was uplifting, she rarely smiled.

As for Donald Trump, last week the experts said he spoke with too much clapping and too many numbers, but good eye contact.

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