2019-09-10: Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates

Figure 1: Popularity measure of the candidates labeled on the basis of their Twitter follower growth in absolute number and percentage

There are more than 20 candidates running for the 2020 Democratic party Presidential nomination but everyone knows there will be only one winner. Since only a handful of the candidates have a real shot of receiving the nomination, the question then arises "why are so many candidates running for their party's nomination?" One answer is that running for the nomination increases a candidate's national media coverage and the resulting popularity creates a launchpad for their future endeavors. This is clearly evident in case of candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang, both of whom have enjoyed increased national exposure regardless of the outcome of the primaries. Since "popularity" is hard to define and quantify, we use the Twitter followers for each candidate as a proxy for their popularity. The absolute and relative increase in the Twitter followers since January 1, 2019 can then be an indicator if the candidates' efforts have been worthwhile in increasing the size of their audience.

Previous Works on Study of Twitter Follower Growth 

FiveThirtyEight published their two-article series about the NBC and CNN Democratic debates where they analyzed each candidate based on five criteria. One of the criteria was the Twitter follower growth chart from the night of the debate to the following afternoon.

Figure 2: Twitter follower growth for Democratic candidates after the NBC debate between the night of the debate and the following afternoon.  Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-first-democratic-debate-in-five-charts/

Figure 3: Twitter follower growth for Democratic candidates after the CNN debate between the night of the debate and the following afternoon.  Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-second-democratic-debate-in-5-charts/

Although FiveThirtyEight captures the immediate effect on an event using the Twitter follower growth, there are other major events such as their campaign announcement and appearing on T.V. shows talking about their candidacy which also affect their overall Twitter follower growth. 

For a better understanding of the Twitter follower growth as a measure of a candidate's popularity, we need to include all the events that have happened in a candidate's campaign until today which requires us to study their historical Twitter information. Miranda Smith in her post "Twitter Follower Count History via the Internet Archive" explains the reason for using the web archives over the Twitter API for finding historical information of Twitter follower count. In this post, we will rework the analysis done by Miranda Smith on the Democratic candidates using the web archives to gather their historical information and present a broader view of the Twitter follower growth for each candidate in 2019.

How we built our data set

Results   

Table 1 is a sortable table which contains the follower count growth in absolute numbers and in percentage, start follower count, end follower count, memento date range, and Twitter handle for all the candidates. Memento date range for a candidate represents the start and the end time of all the mementos collected from the web archives for their Twitter account. Increase represents the increase in absolute number of Twitter followers for a candidate from the first memento to the last memento. Increase% represents the percentage increase in the follower count for a candidate with respect to their first memento follower count.

   

There are two possible reasons why all candidates do not have mementos in the web archives for their Twitter handles on or near 2019-01-01:

• Archiving rate correlates with popularity, so candidates who were less popular are likely to have a lower archival rate. Pete Buttigieg's Twitter account, @petebuttigieg, has 329 mementos in 2019 which is in contrast with the 70 mementos between 2012 and 2018. The high archival rate of his Twitter account can be attributed to the meteoric rise in his Twitter followers by 1.3M. Although Marianne Williamson has 2.6M Twitter followers, she was archived thrice by the Internet Archive between January and March 2019. So, the correlation between archival rate and popularity might not hold in all the situations. 
• The web archives index their mementos by their URLs (URI-R). A change in the Twitter handle creates a new URL for the same web page. In order to fetch all the mementos for a Twitter account, we need to query the web archives with both the URLs which includes the previous and current Twitter handle URLs. Andrew Yang changed his Twitter handle from @andrewyangvfa to @andrewyang which changed the URL to his Twitter account. Therefore, the first memento for @andrewyang in the Internet Archive is from March 21, 2019. John Hickenlooper (@hickforco to @hickenlooper), John Delaney (@JDelaneyforMD to @JohnKDelaney to @johndelaney), and Michael Bennet (@BennetForCO to @MichaelBennet) have also changed their Twitter handles to reflect their shift from state to national focus.   

Figure 4: @billdeblasio added 29K followers with growth rate of 21% and is an example from the "Nobody Noticed" category

Figure 5: @berniesanders added 640K followers with growth rate of 7% and is an example from the "Already Popular" category

Figure 6: @ericswalwell added 84K followers with growth rate of 350% and is an example from the "Beneficial" category

Figure 7: @petebuttigieg added 1.3M followers with growth rate of 1350% and is an example from the "Big Winners" category

• Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders already have a large number of Twitter followers, so even though the absolute size of their increase is large, their relative increase is small. This matches our intuition of them both being nationally recognized names for whom their candidacies are not about setting up their "next move".
• Since January 2019, Pete Buttigieg's Twitter account has witnessed an increase in his follower count by 1.3M, similar to Andrew Yang who witnessed a Twitter follower rise of 515K. The meteoric rise in their Twitter followers is in congruence with both the candidates becoming nationally recognized names within a span of months.    
• The top three candidates with the lowest Twitter follower growth (@JoeSestak, @WayneMessam, and @SethMoulton) have not appeared in any debate.
• Except for Senator Tulsi Gabbard, all the other ten candidates from the top 11 candidates who have the highest growth in their Twitter follower count will be appearing in the third Democratic debate on September 12, 2019. This matches our intuition of using Twitter followers as a proxy for measuring the popularity of candidates.