The Twitter Primary Revisited for May 2019

As I did in March and April, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers among Democratic presidential candidates. Still more candidates have jumped into the race since the last update, 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: 9.29 million (up 40,000)
  2. Cory Booker: 4.25 million (unchanged)
  3. Joe Biden: 3.58 million (up 40,000)
  4. Kamala Harris: 2.68 million (up 80,000)
  5. Marianne Williamson: 2.61 million (unchanged)
  6. Elizabeth Warren: 2.56 million (up 120,000)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1.43 million (up 10,000)
  8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1.42 million (up 30,000)
  9. Pete Buttigieg: 1.09 million (up 108,000)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 699,000 (up 16,000)
  11. Tulsi Gabbard: 367,000 (up 25,000)
  12. Andrew Yang: 282,000 (up 25,000)
  13. Julian Castro: 215,000 (up 6,000)
  14. Steve Bullock: 173,000 (new)
  15. Bill de Blasio: 155,000 (new)
  16. John Hickenlooper: 144,000 (up 4,000)
  17. Seth Moulton: 140,000 (up 2,000)
  18. Eric Swalwell: 87,500 (up 9,300)
  19. Mike Gravel: 84,200 (new)
  20. Jay Inslee: 58,000 (up 16,000)
  21. Michael Bennet: 21,600 (new)
  22. John Delaney: 20,900 (up 1,100)
  23. Tim Ryan: 20,700 (up 1,800)
  24. Wayne Messam: 7,073 (up 723)

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 60.6 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 25.9 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.
  • Harris zipped by Williamson for fourth place.
  • Warren and Buttigieg, both of whom enjoyed boomlets this cycle, enjoyed the largest numbers of new followers.
  • The rate of uptick for all the Democratic Presidential Candidates has slowed (though Trump’s actually picked up).
  • Biden isn’t adding followers at nearly the rate I would expect from a frontrunner.
  • Hickenlooper drops below two newcomers, Bullock and de Blasio, but has seven times the followers of fellow Coloradan Michael Bennet, which may be a comfort for him.
  • Castro, Bullock, de Blasio, Hickenlooper, Moulton, Swalwell, Gravel, Inslee, Bennet, Delaney, Ryan and Messam are all below Yang, and none seem to be on a trajectory to catch him.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 28th, 2019 at 10:22 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.

    One Response to “The Twitter Primary Revisited for May 2019”

    1. Howard says:
      May 28, 2019 at 10:41 AM

      Andrew Sullivan suggests pronouncing his name “Booty judge”. Good idea. I can get behind – er, I mean, agree with – this idea.

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