The Twitter Primary Revisited for September 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 I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.

I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update. Today’s falls on the 24th, while last month’s fell on the 27th, so feel free to adjust accordingly for the three day difference.

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

  1. Bernie Sanders: 9,695,041 (up 101,797)
  2. Cory Booker: 4,357,161 (up 14,798)
  3. Joe Biden: 3,747,843 (up 52,558)
  4. Elizabeth Warren: 3,187,498 (up 124,085)
  5. Kamala Harris: 3,129,357 (up 49,935)
  6. Marianne Williamson: 2,763,349 (up 4,148)
  7. Beto O’Rourke: 1,611,598 (up 55,055)
  8. Pete Buttigieg: 1,442,981 (up 53,657)
  9. Andrew Yang: 878,076 (up 147,817)
  10. Amy Klobuchar: 767,019 (up 14,092)
  11. Tulsi Gabbard: 573,937 (up 34,068)
  12. Julian Castro: 389,362 (up 13,251)
  13. Tom Steyer: 245,075 (up 276)
  14. Steve Bullock: 185,762 (up 847)
  15. Michael Bennet: 39,477 (up 945)
  16. Tim Ryan: 37,374 (up 374)
  17. John Delaney: 36,270 (up 516)
  18. Joe Sestak: 12,938 (up 499)
  19. Wayne Messam: 8,599 (up 509)

Removed from the last update: Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio

For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 64,699,182 followers, up 1,133,230 since the last roundup, so once again Trump has gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26,750,341, 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. And if you’re not looking at the counts with a tool like Social Blade, Twitter does significant (and weird) rounding.
  • Andrew Yang gained the most of all the contenders, up almost 150,000 followers, passing Amy Klobuchar for ninth place. At that pace he’ll break the million follower mark next month.
  • Cory Booker gaining less than 15,000 followers since last month, despite starting with over 4 million, is a strong indication his campaign is dead in the water.
  • Marianne Williamson’s mere 4,000+ gain is even more pathetic. Clearly her magic ride is over.
  • Most pathetic of all is Tom Steyer, who has reportedly been throwing fistfuls of money into social media advertising…and gained 276 followers. That’s less than last-place Wayne Messam gained. Steyer could have gained more by posting cute puppy memes.
  • As predicted, Elizabeth Warren zoomed past Kamala Harris into third place, but her momentum has slowed, as she gained roughly half the followers in September she gained in August.
  • In fact all candidates seemed to slow the rate at which they acquired new followers. Maybe younger people stopped paying as much attention to politics after returning to school after summer vacation.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 24th, 2019 at 7:11 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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