The Twitter Primary Revisited for July 2019

As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s post-debate update. Tom Steyer has jumped into the race, but Eric Swalwell has jumped out, keeping the number of accounts tracked at 25.

However, a big caveat: Twitter has screwed up my counts. They loped the last significant digit off accounts over 1 million followers, so 1.44 million became 1.4 million. This means that several contenders had their number of followers go down, but I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from this, as it appears to be a statistical artifact. Likewise, those whose counts have gone up by less than 50,000 may just be enjoying an artificial bump due to a rounding error. Thus this month’s Twitter Primary is only accurate for showing positional differences between candidates, and for establishing a new baseline for future counts, not for showing accurate gain and loss counts.

Conversely, Twitter seems to have added a significant digit for followers above 100,000 and below one million, so 733,000 became 733,400. This will also change gained and lost counts, though not by nearly as much.

The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9.4 million (up 50,000)
  2. Cory Booker: 4.3 million (up 20,000)
  3. Joe Biden: 3.6 million (down 10,000)
  4. Kamala Harris: 3 million (up 190,000)
  5. Elizabeth Warren: 2.9 million (up 170,000)
  6. Marianne Williamson: 2.7 million (up 30,000)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1.4 million (down 40,000)
  8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1.4 million (down 30,000)
  9. Pete Buttigieg: 1.3 million (up 90,000)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 732,900 (up 26,900)
  11. Andrew Yang: 539,600 (up 59,600)
  12. Tulsi Gabbard: 443,300 (up 62,300)
  13. Julian Castro: 332,500 (up 24,500)
  14. Tom Steyer: 241,400 (new)
  15. Steve Bullock: 178,600 (up 3,600)
  16. Bill de Blasio: 164,800 (up 2,800)
  17. John Hickenlooper: 151,000 (up 2,000)
  18. Seth Moulton: 146,800 (up 3,800)
  19. Mike Gravel: 126,300 (up 15,300)
  20. Jay Inslee: 76,500 (up 4,200)
  21. Michael Bennet: 28,700 (up 3,800)
  22. John Delaney: 27,800 (up 1,900)
  23. Tim Ryan: 26,600 (up 2,300)
  24. Joe Sestak: 11,800 (up 900)
  25. Wayne Messam: 8,090 (up 352)

Removed from the last update: Eric Swalwell.

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 62.4 million followers, up 900,000 since the last roundup. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26.4 million, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

A few notes:

  • Twitter does rounding (even apart from this month’s rounding changes), and counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • Due to the rounding issue, for the first time ever, we’ve see candidate follower counts going down, including frontrunner Biden, whose account went down 10,000 followers, with O’Rourke down 40,000 and Gillibrand down 30,000. Due to the rounding issue, I have to assume this is just statistical noise.
  • Harris and Warren have clearly kept some momentum since the debates, though the rounding makes unclear exactly how much.
  • By contrast, Castro’s momentum appears to have slowed.
  • Yang did well, but Gabbard did even better.
  • Bennet passes Delaney to get the World’s Tallest Midget trophy back.

    • With the debates this week, we can track changes against the new baseline (and hopefully Twitter won’t change their rounding again).

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2019 at 11:19 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.

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