The Twitter Primary Revisited for August 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 update.

Last month, Twitter changed the way it did account rounding. This month, I’ve found a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts. Since the methodology has changed twice in the last two months, consider this a rebasing post, from which we can track actual changes next month. Because of the change, change rates for those with over 1 million followers are taken from Social Blade’s Last 30 Days count. The changes for those with under one million followers hasn’t been so radical, so I can still give rough changes there from the last count.

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

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9,593,244 (up 171,765)
  2. Cory Booker: 4,342,363 (up 37,733)
  3. Joe Biden: 3,695,285 (up 66,276)
  4. Kamala Harris: 3,079,422 (up 93,164)
  5. Elizabeth Warren: 3,063,413 (up 202,592)
  6. Marianne Williamson: 2,759,201 (up 46,859)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1,556,543 (up 115,932)
  8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1,462,026 (up 13,750)
  9. Pete Buttigieg: 1,389,324 (up 102,211)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 752,927 (up about 20,000)
  11. Andrew Yang: 730,259 (up about 200,000)
  12. Tulsi Gabbard: 539,869 (up about 100,000)
  13. Julian Castro: 376,111 (up 40,000)
  14. Tom Steyer: 244,799 (up about 3,000)
  15. Steve Bullock: 184,915 (up about 6,000)
  16. Bill de Blasio: 168,227 (up about 4,800)
  17. Michael Bennet: 38,532 (up about 10,000)
  18. Tim Ryan: 37,000 (up about 10,000)
  19. John Delaney: 35,754 (up about 7,000)
  20. Joe Sestak: 12,439 (up about 600)
  21. Wayne Messam: 8,090 (up 364)

Removed from the last update: John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Mike Gravel, Seth Moulton.

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 63,565,952 followers, up 1.1 million since the last roundup. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26,552,735, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

A few notes:

  • Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • Warren seems to be adding Twitter followers at a faster rate than Harris, and I actually expect her to pass Harris this week.
  • Warren seems to picking up new followers at the rate of about 5,000 a day. Bernie seems to be adding about 4,000 followers a day, while Biden adds just under 2,000 and Harris just under 3,000.
  • For all the eulogies for his campaign, O’Rourke is adding Twitter followers faster than Biden, and indeed slightly faster than Buttigieg.
  • Both Yang and Gabbard continue to show significant momentum, and I expect Yang to pass Klobuchar in September.
  • For all the money Tom Steyer is throwing into Twitter advertising (I see tons on my iPhone), I see no signs he’s picking up significant new followers.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 27th, 2019 at 7:38 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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