The Twitter Primary Revisited for April 2019

A month ago I did a post on the number of Twitter followers among Democratic presidential candidates. A lot of new candidates have jumped into the race since then, so let’s look at how the Twitter Primary stacks up today:

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

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9.25 million (up 90,000)
  2. Cory Booker: 4.25 million (up 30,000)
  3. Joe Biden: 3.54 million (up 40,000)
  4. Marianne Williamson: 2.61 million (unchanged)
  5. Kamala Harris: 2.6 million (up 110,000)
  6. Elizabeth Warren: 2.44 million (up 130,000)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1.42 million (up 50,000)
  8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1.39 million (up 40,000)
  9. Pete Buttigieg: 982,000 (up 494,000)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 683,000 (up 23,000)
  11. Tulsi Gabbard: 341,000 (up 29,000)
  12. Andrew Yang: 257,000 (up 62,000)
  13. Julian Castro: 209,000 (up 15,000)
  14. John Hickenlooper: 139,000 (up 4,000)
  15. Seth Moulton: 138,000 (new)
  16. Eric Swalwell: 77,600 (new)
  17. Jay Inslee: 42,000 (up 6,300)
  18. John Delaney: 19,800 (up 1,700)
  19. Tim Ryan: 18,900 (new)
  20. Wayne Messam: 6,350 (new)

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 59.9 million followers (up 600,000). (The official presidential @POTUS account has 25.7 million, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap.)

A few notes:

  • Twitter does rounding, and counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • Buttigieg is the biggest riser in both absolute and percentage terms, doubling his followers and leapfrogging Klobucher, but he’s still behind O’Rourke. He should crack one million this week.
  • Save Buttigieg, no one below one million followers is on track to have one million followers by the Iowa caucuses.
  • Warren is the second biggest riser in April, up 130,000, which doesn’t jib with the narrative that her campaign has been underwhelming and policy-heavy.
  • Williamson does not seem to be gaining followers, and her vast Twitter readership doesn’t seem to be showing up in polls.
  • Harris also did well, and should soon pass Williamson, but she’s not on track to pass Biden before Iowa.
  • Thus far Biden hasn’t gotten much of a bump from formally entering the race.
  • Booker’s Twitter strength is not showing up in polling.
  • Castro, Hickenlooper, Moulton, Swalwell, Inslee, Delaney, Ryan and Messam are all below Yang, and none seem to be on a trajectory to catch him.

    • Of course, it’s possible that one of the longshots could catch fire, and race up the charts. Buttigieg started as a longshot and is now right in the thick of it. Compared to expectations, Yang is doing very well, but so far not well enough to be an actual contender.

    And watch tomorrow for the regular Clown Car update.

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    This entry was posted on Sunday, April 28th, 2019 at 1:44 PM 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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