The Twitter Primary Revisited for June 2019

As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers among Democratic presidential candidates. Joe Sestak has jumped into the race since the last update, raising the number of accounts tracked to 25. The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of most to least Twitter followers:

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9.33 million (up 40,000)
  2. Cory Booker: 4.26 million (up 10,000)
  3. Joe Biden: 3.6 million (up 20,000)
  4. Kamala Harris: 2.72 million (up 40,000)
  5. Elizabeth Warren: 2.67 million (up 110,000)
  6. Marianne Williamson: 2.62 million (up 10,000)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1.43 million (unchanged)
  8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1.43 million (up 10,000)
  9. Pete Buttigieg: 1.15 million (up 60,000)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 706,000 (up 7,000)
  11. Tulsi Gabbard: 381,000 (up 14,000)
  12. Andrew Yang: 337,000 (up 55,000)
  13. Julian Castro: 221,000 (up 6,000)
  14. Steve Bullock: 175,000 (up 2,000)
  15. Bill de Blasio: 157,000 (up 2,000)
  16. John Hickenlooper: 146,000 (up 2,000)
  17. Seth Moulton: 143,000 (up 3,000)
  18. Mike Gravel: 99,400 (up 9,200)
  19. Eric Swalwell: 93,300 (up 5,800)
  20. Jay Inslee: 65,200 (up 7,200)
  21. Michael Bennet: 23,200 (up 1,600)
  22. John Delaney: 22,400 (up 1,100)
  23. Tim Ryan: 22,300 (up 1,600)
  24. Joe Sestak: 10,700 (new)
  25. Wayne Messam: 7,529 (up 456)

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 61.3 million followers, up 700,000 since the last update. According to my math, that gain in followers is larger than the aggregate gain of all new followers for all Democratic presidential candidates combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26.1 million, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

A few notes:

  • Twitter does rounding, and counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • Warren is the biggest gainer, zipping by Williamson for fifth place. The race will be tight between Warren and Harris for third place next month
  • Buttigieg continues to gain, but more slowly.
  • For those under 1 million followers, Andrew Yang seems to be the only one gaining at an appreciable rate.
  • Biden still isn’t adding followers at nearly the rate I would expect from a frontrunner.
  • Moreover, as per yesterday’s clown car update, there’s some evidence that the Biden campaign has bought fake twitter accounts.
  • It will be interesting to see if this week’s debates shake up the standings.

    • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 25th, 2019 at 10:21 AM and is filed under Democrats, Elections, Media Watch. 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.

    2 Responses to “The Twitter Primary Revisited for June 2019”

    1. Howard says:
      June 26, 2019 at 2:46 PM

      Someone asked about Beto’s fizzle in the rabidly liberal r/politics subreddit, and this response was fascinating:

      Because for the 2018 race Beto hired Revolution Messaging, the single best blue astroturfing organization in politics at the time. RM scripted the “viral” moments (like air-drumming and skateboarding), created the Texas product placement links necessary to make him popular (Whataburger ftw), and proved that a cult of personality campaign is just as feasible for a Democrat than a Republican in Texas.

      Since then Revolution Messaging’s top talent has split up and all taken roles in different campaigns, so isn’t available to make Beto competitive this cycle. That’s why his stock is falling like someone who was never very popular, has awful ideas, is more Republican than Democrat, and requires extensive social media manipulation to even be in a race.

    2. Howard says:
      June 26, 2019 at 2:46 PM

      WordPress didn’t like me a-href-ing the link to Revolution Messaging, so perhaps if I just include it here, that’ll do …

      https://www.opensecrets.org/expends/vendor.php?year=2018&vendor=Revolution+Messaging

    Leave a Reply