Drew Margolin, a professor of communication at Cornell University who studies human dynamics through social media, isn’t just tracking how the electorate is reacting to candidates in one single moment via Twitter, but how they have been reacting since the beginning of the primaries. This historical data gives Drew and his collaborator Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh, a unique window into changing sentiment within a party about candidates and topics, as well as across party affiliations.
For example, how are early Trump or Hillary supporters reacting differently from more general Republicans and Democrats who originally favored another candidate? What about those who may have been #NeverTrump or #NeverHillary? And what does it mean for Election 2016?
Margolin will be dissecting the data from these randomly selected computational focus groups during both National Conventions, the Presidential Debates, and the National Election.
Coverage of the first and second nights of the Republican National Convention (RNC), the make up of their computational focus groups, and general thoughts on using Twitter as a sentiment barometer can be found here. Coverage of Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement can be found here, and analysis of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech here.
The Democratic National Convention: Day One
First, I should re-state who have in our Groups. Just like with the Republicans, we have a randomly selected set of people who fit these criteria:
- Defectors to Hillary: People who started out with another Democrat, now follow Hillary instead
- Hillary Dumpers: People who started out with Hillary, now follow another candidate instead (almost always Bernie Sanders)
- Hillary Avoiders: People who started out with another Democrat, dumped them, don’t (yet) follow Hillary
- Candidate Avoiders: People who started out with Hillary, now follow no Democratic candidates
Also, because of the specific intrigue around Sanders supporters, we added two more groups:
- Hillary Accepters: People who started out following Sanders and now also
- Bernie Holdouts: People who started out following Sanders and still don’t follow Hillary
The first thing that jumps out from the opening night is that attention was substantially below the attention to both the first night and the last night of the RNC. More specifically, our Republican groups were more engaged with the first night of their convention than our Democratic groups were engaged Monday with theirs (by number of tweets sent, though the portion that #hashtag the convention were similar 12-20%). This may have been due to the fact that the RNC kickoff was the very first night of any national convention. The second night of the RNC showed a large drop-off from the first in terms of attention from our Republican tweeters.
Perhaps more interestingly, our Democratic groups paid more attention to the last night of the RNC than they did to the first night of the DNC. During the last night of the RNC, each of the four original Democratic groups tweeted regularly about Donald Trump, mentioning him in 25% of their tweets on average, and every group expressed relatively negative sentiment in these tweets. In addition, outside of the Hillary Dumpers, all three of the Democratic groups expressed relatively positive sentiment about Hillary during the final night of the RNC.
The Trump part of that pattern held Monday. We now have six Democratic groups, and five showed a clear tendency to speak in relatively negative terms about Trump. Only the Hillary Avoiders did not do this, as they did not express relatively strong sentiment about any speaker.
Hillary did not, however, draw much in the way of positive sentiment. Only one group (Candidate Avoiders) showed a significant tendency to use relatively positive terms when talking about Hillary. She did not draw negative sentiment, but there was not a clear positive tendency.
Perhaps more troubling for Clinton, the Bernie insurgency was clearly visible. Bernie Sanders drew positive sentiment from the two groups that are identified for their resistance to Hillary: the Hillary Dumpers — who used to follow Hillary and now follow Sanders — and the Bernie Holdouts — people who started with and still follow Sanders. In addition, the Hillary Dumpers also used #BernieOrBust in 7% of their tweets, much more than #NeverTrump or #NeverHillary received on any other night (including tonight).
But it is hardly Bernie’s party. Outside of these groups, language in tweets mentioning him was neutral. Moreover, though he got more attention from the two groups that favor him, Michelle Obama drew much more attention from the other groups, as did Elizabeth Warren. Michelle Obama, like Ivanka the other night, drew substantial attention and was the only one who was close to either nominee in terms of tweets mentioning her. Sentiment was statistically neutral, however, as it was for Warren.
What should we watch for over the next couple of nights? Sanders’ resistance groups are likely to be key. Our groupings actually divide Sanders constituency into two types. There are the Hillary Dumpers — people who actively unfollowed Hillary Clinton on Twitter — and the Bernie Holdouts — people who have not yet (and may never) follow Hillary. Most of their behavior was quite similar. They gave Sanders more attention and positive sentiment, they were decidedly negative toward Trump, they paid modest attention to (about 1.4% of tweets) attention to Bernie supporter and speaker Sarah Silverman (who called out #BernieOrBust as “ridiculous”) and they used #NeverHillary about the same amount (1.4% of tweets).
There were, however, two interesting differences. First, the Hillary Dumpers made substantial use of #BernieOrBust (225 tweets or 7%), which the Holdouts did not do (3 tweets or about 0.2%). Second, we see that the Holdouts also appear more open to those trying to persuade them. In particular, the Holdouts mentioned Elizabeth Warren in 4% of their tweets, similar to other groups, while the HIllary Dumpers mentioned Warren in only 1.5%, much less than other groups. So Clinton has some hope that the Holdouts can still be converted.
- Drew
For media interviews contact:
Kathleen Corcoran
Office: 202-434-8036
Cell: 607-882-3782
Kmc327 [at] cornell.edu
