The US presidential election has been super exciting this year, not only for US citizens but for the rest of the world too who are following all the twists and turns. Social media, and Twitter especially, have been a big part of this campaign in so many ways: announcements, engagement and even trading barbs between some candidates.
As we reach a pivotal milestone today with the Indiana primaries, we took a look at the last five remaining candidates hoping to clinch the Democratic and Republican nominations.
Looking at Twitter follower count, it is clear that both Trump and
Clinton are ahead of the pack, with Trump having the most followers. It is understandable as both were recognized figures before the start of this campaign.
Drilling into the followers of the candidates, we found many interesting results.
For example, both Clinton and Trump have the highest number of inactive followers (we define inactive followers as those who have been suspended or did not tweet in the last 12 months)
Sanders on the other hand is keeping it real, having the lowest percentage of inactive followers.
As far as influence, Clinton appears to have a larger number of influencers following her (18 followers with more than 1M followers). Trump comes in second at 10, and Kasich has no followers with 1M or more followers. Is Clinton leveraging her Influencers in her campaign?
In terms of Gender, the Democratic candidates have higher percentage of women following them, but surprisingly Sanders has a higher percentage of female followers than Clinton.
We also looked at the followers occupations: John Kasich appears to significantly under-perform with students, and interestingly, Clinton appears to outperform in the Science and Technology field. Another interesting observation: Trump has the highest percentage of students among his followers than all other candidates!
Now onto the most fun part, (at least for us), zooming on geography shows that both Clinton and Trump have significantly higher percentage of followers that are not in the US; in-fact, only half of Clinton’s followers live in the USA. In contrast Cruz has the highest percentage of US followers (90%).
Looking at the battle ground states, Ohio, Florida and Virginia, Trump appears to be leading the pack all across, with more followers than any other candidate.
Oh wait, but how about Indiana?
Well, Trump again is towering in the total follower count here, and the rest of the republican candidates trailing badly here. If it’s any consolation for Cruz here, when we take the followers in percentages, Cruz has 1.6% of followers from Indiana vs Trump’s 1.1%. We could look at a higher resolution of the geography (to city level), but we will leave it for the next analysis.
Finally, we took a look at the excitement level of the supporters of each candidates: we monitored the use of positive hashtags for the different candidates in the 24 hours leading to the Indiana primaries, and it appears that Trump is again towering ahead of all the other candidate. Also surprisingly Sanders is way ahead of Clinton here despite all recent polls showing her ahead.
So what will happen tonight in Indiana?
Our Fedica analysis of the Twitter data gives us the following prediction:
- On the Republican side, Trump is predicted to have a landslide victory in Indiana as he has more followers and much higher excitement in the last 24 hours than the rest of the GOP candidates.
- It is however less clear on the Democratic side: Clinton appears to have more support in Indiana, but the Sanders supporters have much higher excitement level today and might very well pull an upset victory in the Indiana primary.