The Twitter Primary

Twitter is not the end-all and be all of the world, or even of social media, but it does provide a quick-and-dirty estimate of the popularity of various Democratic presidential candidate. So let’s take a snapshot and see who’s winning the Twitter Primary right now.

The following are all the declared Presidential candidates, plus Joe Biden, ranked in order of most to least followers:

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9.16 million
  2. Cory Booker: 4.22 million
  3. Joe Biden: 3.37 million
  4. Marianne Williamson: 2.61 million
  5. Kamala Harris: 2.49 million
  6. Elizabeth Warren: 2.31 million
  7. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1.39 million
  8. Beto O’Rourke: 1.37 million
  9. Amy Klobuchar: 660,000
  10. Pete Buttigieg: 488,000
  11. Tulsi Gabbard: 312,000
  12. Andrew Yang: 195,000
  13. Julian Castro: 194,000
  14. John Hickenlooper: 139,000
  15. Jay Inslee: 42,000
  16. John Delaney: 18,100

A few notes:

  • Twitter does rounding, and counts change all the time, so the number might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • I had an old Twitter account for Andrew Yang, now corrected.
  • For a guy that constantly leads polls, Joe Biden isn’t showing much Twitter strength. Biden’s supporters may also skew older than average, including people not on Twitter. He also hasn’t officially entered the race yet.
  • Media darlings Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke are both doing much worse than you would guess from their hype, and much worse than Cory Booker.
  • Governors in the race have abysmally low Twitter follower counts. Both had official announcemnets in March (though Inslee had been running longer than that), so maybe they will rise in time.
  • Julian Castro, a supposedly serious candidate and the only Hispanic in the race, is losing to Andrew Yang.
  • Judging from Twitter strength alone, Marianne Williamson should be a top tier candidate.
  • If I had included them, “rock star” losers Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams would both go between Klobuchar and Buttigieg.
  • Candidates with more Twitter followers than I expected: Booker, Williamson, Gillibrand, Buttigieg.
  • Candidates with fewer Twitter followers than I expected: Biden, Harris, O’Rourke, Castro, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Delaney.
  • John Delaney’s minuscule number of followers does not bode well for the “non-insane” lane in the primaries.

    • For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 59.3 million followers. (The official presidential @POTUS account has 25.5 million, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap.)

    As crowded as the field is now, the soft Twitter numbers suggest the race could be ripe for a disruptive outsider celebrity candidate…

    Edited to add: Just from starting to compile this yesterday and posting today, some of the numbers have jumped around quite a lot. Kamala Harris dropped from 2.9 million to 2.49 million, and Pete Buttigieg’s followers jumped by 50,000. Updated numbers above. Maybe just normal volatility, or maybe something screwy going on…

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    This entry was posted on Sunday, March 24th, 2019 at 12:14 PM and is filed under Democrats, Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    One Response to “The Twitter Primary”

    1. Howard says:
      March 24, 2019 at 6:09 PM

      For each candidate, look again in 4 weeks. The month-over-month change will be a car more useful comparison point.

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